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409ca7075d075fc94ceb88d527a8b34e | https://www.forbes.com/sites/josephwolkin/2021/04/19/ryan-blaney-is-ready-to-take-the-next-step-with-team-penske/ | Ryan Blaney Is Ready To Take The Next Step With Team Penske | Ryan Blaney Is Ready To Take The Next Step With Team Penske
Ryan Blaney celebrates his first win of the 2021 Nascar Cup Series season at Atlanta Motor Speedway. Getty Images
The number one appears quite often on Ryan Blaney’s Nascar Cup Series stat sheet. He’s been consistently consistent in each of the last five seasons, winning exactly one race every year.
Blaney, 27, is one of Nascar’s rising stars. His laid-back vibes, combined with your eagerness to spend time with him away from the track, makes him a great fit for the future Team Penske.
Now, though, as Blaney’s popularity climbs, he is critiquing himself in order to turn the number one in his win column to multiple.
“The biggest thing you learn, as you do anything enough times, is you don’t have to be 100% all the time,” Blaney said of his early habits behind the wheel. “You don’t have to go 120% on every single lap or every single play. You don’t have to rely completely on your ability to drive, so you think through things more thoughtfully and methodically. It eases your head.”
Blaney’s self-evaluation appears to be working. He already parked his No. 12 Ford Mustang in victory lane in the sixth race of the year at Atlanta Motor Speedway. He recently led 157 of 500 laps at Martinsville Speedway, ultimately finishing 11th.
He has blossomed into one of Nascar’s most exciting drivers to watch. Each year he’s competed in the Cup Series, he’s improved from the season prior.
But for the first time in Blaney’s young career, he locked himself into the Nascar Playoffs within the first quarter of the season. While his mentality doesn’t change, it certainly does help him chase more wins.
“It’s something that, when I look back on my Cup career to this point, I haven’t won until the summer or later,” he said. “It’s nice to win early and be locked into the playoffs. Now, we can try to win two, three, four races. You see all of the champions and you need to have three or four wins. Plus, it helps you out throughout the playoffs.”
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Last March, Blaney signed a multi-year extension to remain at Team Penske, but the details of the agreement were not released. Nonetheless, the agreement, which came a week before Nascar shut down due to Covid-19, gives him some breathing room.
“I was super excited that Mr. Penske and everyone there wanted me back for a number of years,” Blaney said of team owner Roger Penske, who also owns the NTT IndyCar Series and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Just because Blaney has a multi-year deal doesn’t mean the pressure is off. He’s finished inside of the top 10 in the championship standings each year since 2017, but never better than seventh (2019).
If anything, the intensity is picking up for Blaney’s No. 12 team. Teammates Joey Logano and Brad Keselowski each have a “champion” label embroidered on their fire suits, and Blaney believes 2021 is his best chance to have one added to his.
“It’s nice to have a home for a while, but you still need to prove yourself,” Blaney said. “You need to prove you belong there, you can win races and that you improve every year.”
Blaney is in quite the unique situation. He’s one of only a handful of Cup drivers to have secured a multi-year deal, and he doesn’t have to worry about searching for sponsorship.
His No. 12 car is sponsored by home improvement chain Menards, along with Body Armor, Dex Imaging and Advance Auto Parts AAP . Combine the secure sponsorship with Blaney’s multi-year deal and he is certainly riding on a wave that can send him onto the shores of success.
The success, though, is still surreal for Blaney. Sometimes,, it doesn’t even feel like he’s been with Team Penske since 2012, he explained. The almost decade-long journey puts life into perspective.
“I came from a small team in Tommy Baldwin Racing just because my dad was racing in Cup for them,” he said. “I had some Xfinity Series races for those guys, and I was fortunate on the timing because Penske was looking for a new driver.
“[Keselowski’s] Truck Series team was also looking for a new driver. I just happened to be coming into the sport, and they all thought well enough of me to give me a shot.”
Blaney certainly got his shot. Now, he’s ready to prove why he can follow in his teammates’ footsteps and become a champion. The No. 12 Ford finished 11th on Sunday at Richmond Raceway, his best result at the track.
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7ad090618eb088dcdef50fb55cdd8d2a | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbarro/2012/02/22/quick-thoughts-on-the-romney-tax-plan/ | Romney Plan is a Huge Tax Cut | Romney Plan is a Huge Tax Cut
A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money. (Image via... [+] Wikipedia)
I'll have more comments on this to come, particularly as the campaign releases more detail, but the most important thing to know about Romney's proposal is that it's a huge net tax cut. Before base broadening, the plan could be expected to cut federal revenues by about $5 trillion over a 10-year period, compared to a policy of extending 2012 tax policy (except the payroll tax holiday) into the future.
On a static basis (that is, before estimating economic feedback effects from cutting taxes) Romney's corporate tax cuts would cost about $1 trillion, a 20 percent across-the-board cut in personal income tax rates would run about $3 trillion, and then sundry other proposals (most notably, abolishing the AMT and giving capital gains tax relief to lower- and middle-income households) would cost about another $1 trillion.
Those numbers are not exact, and the campaign indicated on a press call today that it has a score which it plans to release in the future. But while the campaign's number will surely deviate somewhat from $5 trillion, it will in any case be large.
The Romney campaign says this plan will be fully offset so as not to grow the deficit. The campaign's fact sheet identifies three categories of deficit offsets (emphasis mine):
Government cannot continue to increase irresponsibly the size of annual deficits. Stronger economic growth and reductions in spending will help to ensure that these tax cuts do not expand deficits. In addition, higher-income Americans in particular will see limits placed on deductions, exemptions, and credits that are currently available.
Getting to $5 trillion from these three categories is going to be a challenge. Let's take a look at them individually.
Base broadening (limits on deductions, exemptions and credits). In order to put a big dent in the revenue losses due to this proposal, Romney would need a very aggressive broadening of the tax base. For comparison, President Obama's fairly aggressive plan to limit itemized deductions for people with high incomes would raise a bit less than $600 billion over 10 years. Will Romney get to a bigger number by going after popular middle-class tax benefits like the tax exclusion for health benefits and the mortgage interest deduction? I would certainly support that, but Romney's focus on high earners makes me doubt that he'll beat Obama's figure by much. Dynamic effects (including economic growth). I think it is likely that a significant minority of the $1 trillion cost to cut corporate taxes would be covered by dynamic effects--that is, the tax cuts would lead to greater taxable corporate income, because of higher investment and because of reduced efforts to shift taxation to other jurisdictions. Dynamic effects would not cover much of the $4 trillion revenue loss from the other tax cuts, which are not targeted at taxpayers who can be expected to be especially responsive to incentives. Spending cuts. Base broadening and dynamic effects aren't likely to come anywhere close to offsetting a $5 trillion static revenue loss. As such, I expect that Romney would have to lean heavily on deep cuts in federal spending--a challenge, especially since Romney has made commitments to expand military spending. It is important to remember that this tax cut will require spending cuts over and above those that are already necessary to close the long-term budget gap that will exist even if tax policy remains the same as it is today.
This tax plan does something that Romney had, to date, avoided: it promises Republican primary voters a big tax cut at a time when federal revenues are unusually low and projected budget deficits are very large. While the political impulse here is clear, I think Romney had been wise, from a policy perspective, to avoid making such a promise. This plan, therefore, is a negative development.
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3c61f15e7e33f0852f6911c6418ddd80 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbarro/2012/02/27/this-is-why-people-hate-jury-duty/ | This is Why People Hate Jury Duty | This is Why People Hate Jury Duty
A love of jury duty is just one trait that Pauly Shore and Matt Yglesias share. (Image via... [+] Wikipedia)
Slate's Matt Yglesias has a classic #slatepitch today, arguing that people should learn to love jury duty:
Is everyone else's job really so amazing that they can't bear the thought of a few days off to listen to testimony and pronounce on a verdict? I don't buy it. I feel like as a society we've coordinated on a pointless anti-social norm that you're some kind of sucker if you're willing to just smile and do what the judge wants even though there are no really good self-interested reasons to want out. For salaried professionals, jury duty is a paid vacation. What's not to like?
It's true that many salaried workers can go to jury duty without losing pay or burning vacation days. But is it really a "paid vacation"? That depends on the nature of your job. If you're just one interchangeable cog in a corporate or government machine, maybe you can sit on a jury and let your workload fall to your co-workers. But for a lot of salaried professionals, jury duty means being at the courthouse from 8 to 4 and then going into the office to attend to a slew of matters that only you are equipped to handle.
In 2008, my then-boyfriend sat on a murder trial in Queens, which took a week and a half. Most of his fellow jurors were public employees, and they took Matt's attitude toward jury duty--on the last day, they even reached a verdict at 10 AM but insisted on waiting to deliver it so they could get the free lunch. But every afternoon after court, Dave was leaving Kew Gardens for Manhattan to do hours of work he couldn't do during the day. When I was a banker, my boss spent two weeks on a grand jury, but that certainly didn't mean she wasn't coming to the office. I even have a friend who is timing his move out of Washington D.C. to avoid compliance with a grand jury summons.
If you have a job that you can just drop for a few days--and an employer willing to pay you while you don't work--then sure, jury duty might be fun. Most people don't fall into both of those categories.
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14ca5a6e2bd7d733b7537ffea7fa9fcd | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbarro/2012/03/15/santorum-promises-broad-war-on-porn/ | Santorum Promises Broad War on Porn | Santorum Promises Broad War on Porn
You had better not be watching what Rick Santorum thinks you're watching. (Image via Wikipedia)
The Daily Caller flags a little-discussed position paper on Rick Santorum’s campaign website—his pledge to aggressively prosecute those who produce and distribute pornography. Santorum avers that “America is suffering a pandemic of harm from pornography.” He pledges to use the resources of the Department of Justice to fight that “pandemic,” by bringing obscenity prosecutions against pornographers.
I would note that this is very different from what the Bush Administration did. The Bush DOJ did establish an Obscenity Prosecution Task Force in 2005, but this body focused on bringing prosecutions against small-time producers who made porn with extreme content. (Even so, it faced significant pushback from U.S. Attorneys, some of whom viewed such prosecutions as a distraction and a misuse of resources.) Many social conservative groups were disappointed with the task force, contending that more mainstream hardcore porn violates obscenity laws, and they urged the Bush Administration to bring obscenity cases against major producers.
Santorum promises that he would do exactly this. His statement references going after pornography that is distributed not just on the Internet, but also “on cable/satellite TV, on hotel/motel TV.” Perhaps I am not staying in the most interesting hotels, but my impression is that porn distributed through such channels is almost definitionally not extreme. Santorum’s statement also touts his work on this issue with “groups including Morality in Media, Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, American Family Association”—many of which were among the groups calling on the Bush Administration to prosecute mainstream porn producers in 2007. And he says he “proudly support[s] the efforts of the War on Illegal Pornography Coalition,” which advocates the use of obscenity laws against mainstream porn.
Some of Santorum’s defenders have taken the tack of separating his personal views from his policy views. Santorum thinks contraception is “not OK” and he has announced his intention to use the bully pulpit to discuss “the dangers of contraception.” But he doesn’t think contraception should be illegal, and he voted for Title X contraception subsidies (though he said in a recent debate that he opposes Title X, despite voting for it.) On pornography, though, Santorum’s views can’t be written off as purely personal—he has stated a clear intent to use the levers of government to stop adults from making and watching porn.
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0df1331f9b55d6f213349d785c57897b | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbarro/2012/03/26/trayvon-martin-and-the-rights-race-problem/ | Trayvon Martin and the Right's Race Problem | Trayvon Martin and the Right's Race Problem
If conservatives keep letting Newt get away with these sorts of comments, why should they be taken... [+] seriously on issues relating to race? (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)
Late last week, President Barack Obama waded into the controversy over the Trayvon Martin shooting with two minutes of totally innocuous comments. His remarks ended with this:
But my main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son he’d look like Trayvon. And I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves and get to the bottom of exactly what happened.
For this, certain figures on the Right have pounced on Obama. Newt Gingrich called the president’s remarks “disgraceful” and asked “Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot that would be ok because it didn’t look like him?” No, Newt. That’s not what the President was saying.
Gingrich, who is fond of calling Obama the “food-stamp president” and has alleged that Obama exhibits “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior,” is down in the polls now but did two spells as the leader in national GOP primary polls. And the weaknesses that brought Gingrich down had nothing to do with his race-baiting being unpopular with the GOP base.
Today, Rush Limbaugh went after Obama over the same comments. Of course, Rush being ridiculous on race verges on a cliché, but it’s still embarrassing because of the way Republican officials kowtow to him. (In 2009, Rep. Phil Gingrey ran afoul of Limbaugh and then promptly issued a statement calling him one of “the voices of the conservative movement’s conscience.”)
Rush’s comments were keyed to a Jay Nordlinger piece in National Review, in which Nordlinger claimed it doesn’t “occur to him” that Michelle Obama is black—and whacked the president for bringing up Martin’s race.
The claim running through these objections is that black Americans cannot have any special concerns in need of airing. Many of the issues raised in the Trayvon Martin case—was Trayvon Martin singled out for suspicion because he was black? Did race influence the Sanford police’s handling of the case? What is the burden of profiling on young black men?—are therefore off limits.
Conservatives, almost universally, feel like they get a bad rap on race. They catch heat when they point out improvements over the last several decades in race relations and in the material well being of minorities in America, even though those phenomena are real. They catch heat when they contend that government programs intended to help the poor have led to problems with dependency in minority communities, even though those critiques are sometimes correct. They catch heat when they criticize Affirmative Action, even when in some cases (as at the University of California) Affirmative Action was clearly disserving minority communities.
Why do conservatives catch such heat? It’s probably because there is still so much racism on the Right to go alongside valid arguments on issues relating to race and ethnicity. Conservatives so often get unfairly pounded on race because, so often, conservatives get fairly pounded on race.
And this is the Right’s own fault, because conservatives are not serious about draining the swamp.
In recent months, both Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum have gotten questions at public events that referred to President Obama being a Muslim. Neither candidate corrected the questioner. Santorum later told a reporter that’s “not his job.” PPP polls in Mississippi and Alabama have found that about half of Republican voters believe Obama is a Muslim, and others aren’t sure.
For years, Republicans have done a dance with the Birthers in the Republican base, trying to avoid associating themselves with the Birther position without alienating activists who believe the President was born abroad. Donald Trump has worked to keep Birtherism alive and in the news, and in January, Mitt Romney went to appeared in Las Vegas to accept his endorsement on live television. Republican rejections of Birtherism tend to focus on the issue being “a distraction,” as RNC Chairman Reince Preibus puts it, rather than pointedly noting that it is a nutty, racist conspiracy theory.
There has been a clear strategic calculation here among Republican elites. Better to leverage or at least accept the racism of much of the Republican base than try to clean it up. I remember a moment in the 2008 campaign where John McCain argued with a voter who said that Obama was “an Arab.” This time around, either the candidates don’t care about standing up to racial misconceptions or have decided they can’t afford to.
And on a more substantive policy issue, you have Gingrich’s rejection of the idea that there is even a racial matter to discuss in the Martin case. You don’t have to assume that George Zimmerman is guilty of murder (Julian Sanchez has a good piece on this) to recognize that Trayvon Martin would likely to be alive today if he were white.
The question of what to do about that is complicated, but it’s clearly a public policy concern. Instead, Gingrich commits an error that is common on the Right—jumping from the fact that race relations have improved to a claim that black Americans no longer have special policy concerns worth discussing.
It’s disgraceful that Gingrich would call bringing up Trayvon Martin’s race disgraceful. It also undermines everything else that conservatives say about race, no matter how valid. How are Republicans supposed to be taken seriously when they say they understand black Americans’ policy needs when Newt Gingrich is spouting nonsense like this?
My challenge to conservatives who feel they get a bum rap on race is this. Stand up for yourself and your colleagues when you feel that a criticism is unfair. At the same time, criticize other conservatives who say racist things, cynically tolerate racism in the Republican base, or deny the mere existence of racial issues in America today. The conservative movement desperately needs self-policing on racial issues, if it ever hopes to have credibility on them.
Note: An earlier version of this post said that Mitt Romney had traveled to Las Vegas to accept Donald Trump's endorsement. Romney had already been scheduled to be in Las Vegas. I regret the error.
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f5d172345029722c096fe762f4d3e484 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbarro/2012/04/17/why-doesnt-the-irs-do-your-taxes-for-you/ | Why Doesn't the IRS Do Your Taxes For You? | Why Doesn't the IRS Do Your Taxes For You?
taxes (Photo credit: 401K) It’s Tax Day, and many of you are probably rushing to complete your returns before the filing deadline. At Slate, Matt Yglesias points out that this process doesn’t have to be so difficult. The IRS has much of the information they need to fill out your tax return, so why don’t they just send you a partly or fully completed return for your review? Indeed, such a system has been proposed federally and adopted in at least one state (in California, it’s called ReadyReturn) but Congress has refused to move forward. Yglesias focuses on a public choice problem—tax filers are made a little bit better off by this policy, but tax preparers are made a lot worse off, so they lobby to block ReadyReturn and similar programs. He also notes that some conservatives oppose pre-filled returns on the grounds that they might reduce public opposition to income taxes.
But I have a separate concern about ReadyReturn—what if it undermines tax compliance?
The key feature of the income tax that encourages compliance is two-party reporting. You send the IRS a Form 1040, and the people who paid you during the year send Forms 1099, W-2 and the like. If you lie about your income, the figures reported by your employers and clients will expose you.
But what if, when filing your return, you already know that one of your clients has failed to report what he paid you? In a ReadyReturn system, the government has to lay its cards on the table—before the taxpayer files, he knows exactly what the government knows about his earnings, and what it doesn’t know.
Today, if a taxpayer doesn’t get a 1099 form that he’s expecting, he probably asks his client where it is—he doesn’t want the IRS to get a copy of a form that he doesn’t have. But with the knowledge that the IRS never got a copy, either, he might just go ahead and underreport his income. An “oopsie” defense would likely work just fine for omitted 1099s that later came to light, so long as they did not amount to a substantial underreporting of income (that is, 10 percent or $5,000, whichever is less). After all, you didn’t prepare your taxes—the IRS did.
It’s a lot like when you check out of a hotel and review your bill. If you notice the hotel charged you for an extra night of parking, you’ll complain and get the charge taken off. But let’s say you notice that they’ve accidentally omitted to charge you for one night of parking. Do you call the clerk’s attention and ask for a parking charge to be added? Be honest.
Maybe this wouldn’t be that big a problem because there aren’t that many payer-side reporting errors. Or maybe the reduction in tax compliance costs from ReadyReturn would outweigh any increase in tax evasion. But I do worry that ReadyReturn would, at least to some degree, undermine the advantages of two-party reporting and increase the tax gap.
See Also:
Beyond The Buffett Rule: 10 Stupid Tax Code Gimmicks
Better Late Than Never: Filing For A Tax Extension
The Arbitrariness Of The Buffett Rule
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840a9608502189d4335c0731416d6687 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbarro/2012/05/09/whether-obama-likes-it-or-not-gay-marriage-is-a-federal-issue/ | Whether Obama Likes It Or Not, Gay Marriage Is a Federal Issue | Whether Obama Likes It Or Not, Gay Marriage Is a Federal Issue
Barack Obama (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Today, Barack Obama ended years of speculation and finally announced his support for gay marriage. (And good for him; this was the right thing to do.) But the President’s comments, and the talking points that accompany them, take pains to make clear that the White House views marriage as a state issue, and that the President thinks it should be up to the states to decide who can get married.
We haven’t seen the full quotes yet, but the ABC News summary says “the president stressed that this is a personal position, and that he still supports the concept of states' deciding the issue on their own.” The White House talking points include the statement “this isn’t a federal issue.”
But even though marriage licenses are issued by states, federal marriage policy is extensive. The federal government has special tax rules for married people. It gives spouses rights and responsibilities under programs like Social Security. It offers benefits to the spouses of its several million employees. And it confers citizenship on foreigners based on their marriages to U.S. citizens.
President Obama has refused to defend Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, which states that the federal government does not recognize same-sex marriages, against constitutional challenges. So it’s clear that he thinks the federal government should treat married gays as married if they live in jurisdictions that allow gay marriage.
But what about gays who live in states that don’t have gay marriage? Should North Carolina be able to decide that its gay residents don’t get to file joint federal income tax returns, even if they are legally married by another state? Should gay federal workers get spousal benefits only if they work in gay marriage states? Or should the federal government treat gay couples as married no matter where they move?
There is also the issue of joint federal-state programs like Medicaid. These programs are operated by the states, but the federal government pays much of their cost and imposes certain rules about how states must operate them. Should the federal government require that states recognize gay marriages for the purposes of these programs?
And there is the immigration issue. Should gay marriages (foreign or domestic) be valid for immigration to the United States?
Some portion of marriage policy can be left up to the states. But gay marriage is also very much a federal issue requiring federal policy solutions. In the coming months, Barack Obama will need to address them, whether he wants to or not.
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ee3332634131ea0fe7bf92acbc25b52c | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbenjamin/2015/11/16/tissot-president-francois-thiebaud-discusses-revolutionary-deal-with-nba/ | Tissot President Francois Thiebaud Discusses Deal With NBA | Tissot President Francois Thiebaud Discusses Deal With NBA
Tissot Watches, the 162-year-old Swiss company (part of the Swatch family), made headlines prior to the 2015-16 NBA season when it announced that it agreed to a six-year, $200 million deal with the league to become its official timekeeper. This is the first time that any major American professional sports league has had an official timekeeper. Considering that the NCAA receives over $1 billion annually from March Madness ad revenues for its yearly men's basketball tournament, Tissot's deal is quite significant.
Thiebaud Francois, right, member of the executive Group Management Board of The Swatch Group, and... [+] Florence Ollivier, left, member of the executive Board, attend a media conference of the Swatch Group in Geneva, Switzerland, Thursday, April 19, 2007. (KEYSTONE/Magali Girardin)
Tissot president Francois Thiebaud was recently in New York City to discuss the deal with the press, and I had the pleasure of spending some one-on-one time with him to get his take on the deal, while also discussing longtime Tissot ambassador and San Antonio Spurs point guard Tony Parker and the future of Tissot as a result of the deal.
Josh Benjamin: America has the NFL, MLB and so many athletic leagues and associations. What made you pick the NBA?
Francois Thiebaud: We’ve had commitments with basketball since 2008. In 2008, we signed with FIBA for a World Championships contract and a European tournament as well. So we have collaborated with basketball for the last seven years. I met NBA people at the World Championships in Istanbul. I really enjoyed the World Championship in Istanbul because of the fighting spirit and the beauty of it. In a way, I’m a bit impatient to wait another four years to see another World Championship, it doesn’t happen every year. Now, with the NBA, we have the World Championship every week!
JB: Tell me about yours and the company’s relationship with Tony Parker.
FT: He’s a really wonderful person. I love him. I love him because the first time I saw Tony, he was smiling. And when you meet someone smiling, it means a lot. He’s French. I’m also French. My team met him for the contract at the Tissot store we have in Champs Elysee to do the signing, and he said “Mr Thiebaud, what I like about Tissot is that when you have an ambassador, you keep them.”
Because he saw at this time that we had Michael Owen, who used to be an English player, very famous, and twice he was injured for the World Championship and could not play. But we kept him because when you become part of the Tissot Family, you’re part of that family forever. It’s like a wedding. And he knows that even when the day comes that he stops playing, we will stay together and he will be a member of the family.
And Tony was discovered because we know that he’s a good basketball player. He’s captain of the French team. He did an event where he helped design, and it became a charity event held every year in France. We did it once in Bookie’s restaurant in France, and last year I came back from Asia I took a driver to take me there and there was the charity event where you saw a heart outside that said “Tony Parker.”
That is a side of Tony. That is the kind of values that we like at Tissot. Look at the Swiss flag, it’s a positive sign. The NBA is really positive. At a game, you’re so close to the sight that you can practically touch it. The league is all about positive values, and this is the biggest partnership we have ever done. We signed for the next six years, but maybe 60 years or 600 years in the future.
JB: What market are you targeting with this deal? Who is your ideal demographic?
FT: The main market we want to be targeted first is the U.S. because Tissot, we are one of the strongest. To give you an idea of Tissot today, we have a total value from the old Swiss watch companies, out of 400 Swiss watchmakers, we are number five. Looking at total value, you have Rolex at number one, you get Omega at number two, you get Cartier at number three, value-wise. Longines four and Tissot five. Even if you look at Tag Heuer, we do more than double than Tag Heuer, just to give an idea. Now, if you look at unit, we are number two, with Swatch Watch in the No. 1 position. We exported more than 4 million pieces last year, 4.2 million. We are a key player. And that is what we are trying to do with the NBA. Tissot is a strong brand. We are not a new brand. Tissot, since 1853, for 162 years, every working day Tissot has produced watches. We are one of the key players in the Swiss watch industry. If you look at history, Tissot has been a very strong player, but not a key player in the American market. America is a very magnificent market and now that we are a key player with the NBA, maybe more people will pay attention to Tissot.
JB: What’s next for Tissot? How else can you creatively advertise other than the NBA?
FT: We already have so many partnerships. We have a partnership with Danica Patrick, we have Tony Parker and we have Nicky Hayden. And Nicky Hayden, by the way, former MotoGP World Champion, is going to race next year in SuperBike and we do expect that we’ll see Nicky entered into the Hall of Fame and be the first to be World Champion in MotoGP and SuperBike. I love America, I’ve wanted to come here since I was young. You’ve heard of Charles Lindbergh, the great pilot who flew across the Atlantic. I used to be a pilot and had to stop flying, but I still do so in my head. I went to Canada, and have been from east to west. I’ve been to LA and to San Francisco, even Seattle, but I’ve never been to middle America. In the next years to come I hope to see all of America, and maybe with the NBA partnership I can get to see it.
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114b9a3a02fc73986ca472e474ce7247 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbenjamin/2016/11/17/30-teams-in-30-days-what-to-make-of-the-milwaukee-bucks/ | 30 Teams In 30 Days: What To Make Of The Milwaukee Bucks? | 30 Teams In 30 Days: What To Make Of The Milwaukee Bucks?
It's hard to describe the Milwaukee Bucks. They are team built primarily around youth and have great young players, but their veterans also have value of their own. The problem is that so many of their more expensive players are either role players, injured, not productive or all of the above.
NEW YORK, NY - MARCH 20: Head coach Jason Kidd has the young talent the Bucks need to contend, but... [+] must also build off of winning just 33 games last year. (Photo by Elsa/Getty Images)
This certainly isn't an ideal situation since the team has already broke ground on a $500 million arena set to open in 2018. Milwaukee has a talented team and the Bradley Center is certainly out of date, but this isn't a situation like when the Brooklyn Nets played their first season at the Barclays Center. That team won 49 games and made the playoffs, though they lost in the first round.
The Bucks have made the postseason three times in the last six years, but have never made it past the first round. Talented though the team is, it is still a very young one and needs to improve upon last season.
Milwaukee was 33-49 in 2015-16 while barely over the cap at $70.5 million, putting cost-per-win at a hefty $2.1 million. That's unacceptable after making the postseason the year before.
The salary cap has risen from $70 million to $94.1 million this year and though Milwaukee is 5-5 despite key scorer Khris Middleton being injured, they are still over at $98.4 million. A new arena combined with all of that means that owners Marc Lasry and Wesley Edens could soon have some decisions to make, and not easy ones.
Greatest Addition: Matthew Dellavedova
Matthew Dellavedova's tenacity and championship experience make his contract worth it, even if he... [+] doesn't put up superstar numbers. (AP Photo/Duane Burleson)
Championship experience is important on a team as young as the Bucks and that is why GM John Hammond's signing Dellavedova was a perfectly timed move. The 26-year-old Australian was on the Cleveland Cavaliers team that won last season's NBA Finals and was a great spark off the bench. As a restricted free agent, he signed a four-year, $38.4 million offer sheet with Milwaukee that Cleveland did not match.
Dellavedova's numbers with the Bucks are not eye-popping, but he still provides value as a point guard. He is averaging 8.2 points and six assists per game while shooting 42.1% from the field. Those are all career highs.
Dellavedova's playmaking abilities might always be overshadowed by the overwhelming versatility of teammate Giannis Antetokounmpo but that doesn't take away from how important he is to this team. He is already looking better as a passer, plays aggressive defense and is good for an occasional three-pointer.
He isn't a flashy addition by any means and isn't a superstar, but Dellavedova's contract is team-friendly at $9.6 million a year and championship experience does matter. The Bucks probably won't win a championship this year but if they do make the postseason, Dellavedova will have plenty of lessons to impart onto his young teammates.
Greatest Loss: Michael Carter-Williams
ATLANTA, GA - FEBRUARY 20: Michael Carter-Williams has talent, but the Bucks had to trade him to... [+] fill a big hole. (Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)
Dellavedova was brought aboard to supplant Michael Carter-Williams, a former Rookie of the Year who fell victim to injuries and circumstance. Milwaukee acquired him from the Philadelphia 76ers midway through his second season in the deal that sent Brandon Knight from the Bucks to the Phoenix Suns in return for Miles Plumlee and Tyler Ennis.
Carter-Williams certainly had his perks, namely that he was a 6-foot-6 point guard who was a strong passer and tough defender. He averaged 14.5 points, 6.1 assists and 1.7 steals per game over his first three seasons and appeared to have a bright future in spite of low shooting percentages.
Then, Middleton got hurt and help at the 2 was needed beyond aging veteran Jason Terry and second-year man Rashad Vaughn. Carter-Williams, who was limited to 54 games due to injury, was traded to the Chicago Bulls for Tony Snell.
The deal is a wash statistically, especially since Carter-Williams will be backing up Rajon Rondo in Chicago once his latest injury heals, but he is still a former Rookie of the Year. Carter-Williams also shot a career best 45.2% from the field for Milwaukee last year and was still a strong playmaker and on-ball defender. He won't be missed too much, but still provided a great deal when healthy.
Greatest Asset: The Young Bucks
BOSTON, MA - FEBRUARY 25: Giannis Antetokounmpo is the unquestioned leader of a young and valuable... [+] Milwaukee Bucks core. (Photo by Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
The Bucks are a young team, so young that only three players on the roster are over 30 years of age. The inexperience may sound concerning but Milwaukee's core of youngsters could be enough to push the team forward. This core is made up of three players: Giannis Antetokounpo, Jabari Parker and, though he's currently injured, Khris Middleton.
Middleton, 25, is a former second-round pick who found his NBA footing playing shooting guard for the Bucks in his second season. He broke out last year to the tune of 18.2 points per game while shooting 44.4% from the field and an impressive 39.6% from three-point range. This year is the second of a five-year $70 million deal he signed as a restricted free agent in 2015 and though he may miss the entire season after undergoing hamstring surgery, there's a chance he could still be back to help lead a late season charge.
The 21-year-old Parker is a different kind of player. He was drafted second overall out of Duke in 2014 and has continued to improve despite a torn ACL limiting him to 25 games his rookie season. Rather than regress, he has turned into a dominant forward and is averaging 19.5 points and 6.3 rebounds this year.
Finally, there is 21-year-old Antetokounmpo. He is 6-foot-11 and weighs 222 pounds but may as well be a point guard. He is averaging 21.8 points, 8.9 rebounds, 5.5 assists, 2.1 blocks and 1.9 steals per game while shooting 51.8% from the field. The best part? He is earning just under $3 million this year, the final one of his rookie contract, before a new $100 million extension kicks in.
These three earn a combined $23.5 million, still great value even though Middleton is still hurt and his $15.2 million salary inflates that total. But the fact remains that if the Bucks are to get back to the playoffs, it's going to be largely because these three play so well together and know how to make it work on the court. If that chemistry goes into overdrive, the rest of the NBA had better take note.
Greatest Liability: Miles Plumlee
Miles Plumlee is not a dominant center and isn't worth anything close to the money he is being paid... [+] under the terms of his new contract. (AP Photo/Aaron Gash)
Miles Plumlee is 6-foot-11, 249 pounds and, at 28 years old, one would think he is a dominant NBA center. After all, he did sign a four-year, $50 million extension over the summer, so he must be great? Right?
Wrong. Plumlee appeared in 60 games last year and shot 60.1% from the field, but averaged just 5.1 points and 3.8 rebounds over 14.3 minutes per game before signing his new contract. His playing time has dipped to 12.8 minutes this season and he is averaging just three points and 2.4 rebounds per contest. Even more mind-boggling is that Plumlee has started eight of Milwaukee's ten games thus far.
Jason Kidd is the Bucks' coach and how he dishes out minutes or sets the lineup is his decision, but just why he would roll with Plumlee when he can start the far superior Greg Monroe is puzzling. Maybe it's to provide a boost off the bench.
Either way, the fact of the matter is that Plumlee is nowhere near deserving of $12.5 million a year and has looked anything but elite the past few years. This is a deal that Hammond will regret, especially as Thon Maker continues to develop.
Final Thoughts
BOSTON, MA - FEBRUARY 25: Jabari Parker #12 of the Milwaukee Bucks runs down court during the third... [+] quarter against the Boston Celtics at TD Garden on February 25, 2016 in Boston, Massachusetts. (Photo by Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
The Eastern Conference is weak compared to the West, meaning that the Bucks do have an outside shot of making the playoffs this season. Their 5-5 start puts them at at ninth in the conference but there is still plenty of time to improve.
It's going to take a lot of time and effort with Middleton out, possibly for the entire season, but Antentokounmpo and Parker are both talented enough that they can carry this team forward. Having Dellavedova doing what he does while playing extended minutes will also be a boon.
That said, will the Milwaukee Bucks win a championship this year? Certainly not, but the pieces are in place for future success. So long as team ownership maintains trust in Kidd and what he has been able to get out of this team, the Bucks' on-court product could be something to see once the new arena opens in 2018.
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6f592bbeae5b25f47b9ef1994672f1ea | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2012/02/12/linkedin-is-disrupting-the-corporate-recruiting-market/ | LinkedIn is Disrupting the Corporate Recruiting Market | LinkedIn is Disrupting the Corporate Recruiting Market
Last week LinkedIn reported amazing financials (stock jumped almost 20% in one day).
The company reported 105% YTY growth in quarterly revenues to $167.7 Million, putting the company on a 2012 plan of $860 Million.
But the real story is the huge jump in revenues from LinkedIn's recruiting services ("Hiring Solutions"). Revenues in this segment grew by 136% to $84.9 Million, making the company the fastest growing public provider of corporate recruiting solutions.
To give you a sense of how dramatic this is: LinkedIn's recruiting revenues are now greater than Taleo's (which was just acquired by Oracle for $1.9 Billion) and within the year could reach the size of Monster.com. Monster's recruiting revenues were $250 million last quarter and only grew by 2%.
[To better understand the spending and marketplace for talent acquisition, read the Talent Acquisition Factbook®.]
And this growth is just beginning. The company offers a wide range of recruiting solutions now includes:
LinkedIn Recruiter (the company's recruiting platform) gives companies access to the entire database of 150 million professionals to find and seek passive candidates, LinkedIn Job Postings, lets you post jobs and buy highly targeted ads (LinkedIn ads are very intelligent and they promote themselves to LinkedIn users in a very powerful way), and our research shows that they can be much more effective than ads placed on Facebook for professional positions, LinkedIn Employment Branding services now let you build out a career website within the LinkedIn network, to attract candidates, promote jobs to the right people, LinkedIn Talent Pipeline manages your stream of incoming candidates, giving you capabilities similar to a candidate marketing and applicant tracking system.
And there is more to come.
Even though LinkedIn's original vision was to become a professional social network to bring people together, it has become "the place" for professionals to network, look for jobs, and "be found" by employers.
There are many elements to the recruiting marketplace, including the market for applicant tracking software (Taleo, Lumesse, Kenexa), assessments (SHL, Kenexa, DDI, and hundreds others), recruitment services providers (often called agencies or RPOs), candidate relationship management systems (hot tools like like Jobs2Web, just acquired by SAP), social referral systems (like JobVite), and interviewing tools (hot companies like HireVue). But the hottest part of this market is tools for sourcing.
Sourcing is the difficult and often highly secretive process of "finding the right candidates" - seeking them out, contacting them, getting them interested in your position, and then bringing them into your screening and assessment process. We used to have to hire a contract recruiter (or Korn/Ferry, Heidrick & Struggles, and hundreds more) who has deep skills in locating candidates, vetting their skills, and attracting them to your position.
Now, these companies are all using LinkedIn to replace their own networks, and corporate recruiters are going through an enormous transformation as they learn how to source passive candidates themselves. Not all companies are going to bring this in-house (many are), but no matter where you go, LinkedIn is now the most powerful tool on the web for sourcing (professional candidates).
LinkedIn is not Facebook. This is a company with a very different business model, personality, and focus. While we know that LinkedIn does live and die by the size of its membership, the company is now becoming very focused and educated about the needs of corporate recruiters and talent management professionals.
LinkedIn is disrupting the market for job boards, advertisers, recruitment service firms, and recruitment software companies. Maybe Taleo sold to Oracle at just the right time - the market for recruiting tools is shifting, away from tools for resume management and workflow toward new tools for sourcing, talent analytics, assessment, interview management, and search.
We estimate that the total worldwide recruiting market is over $130 billion in software, services, content, consulting, and staff. (The Talent Acquisition Factbook® has all the numbers.)
LinkedIn has a lot of runway ahead.
(Full Disclosure: LinkedIn is a Bersin & Associates research member.)
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803c8a4244688445a730f7eab94401dc | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2012/05/07/linkedins-growth-continues-fueling-the-corporate-talent-machine/ | LinkedIn's Growth Continues: Fueling the Corporate Talent Machine | LinkedIn's Growth Continues: Fueling the Corporate Talent Machine
Another amazing quarter from LinkedIn: revenues of $188.5 Million, up 101%, with the "hiring solutions" business now driving $102.6 Million or 54% of company revenue. LinkedIn's revenues in the corporate recruiting market are now larger than Taleo (just acquired by Oracle for $1.9 Billion), SuccessFactors (just acquired by SAP for $3.4 billion), Kenexa, and nearly every other software company which sells recruiting solutions.
Let me highlight how LinkedIn is "fueling the corporate talent machine."
LinkedIn has become the "must have" in corporate recruiting and is expanding its footprint.
With more than 161 million professional users in its network, LinkedIn is now the "must-have" tool for corporate recruiters around the world. The company's "hiring solutions" business continues to deliver innovative products which leverage the data in the LinkedIn network for corporate and contract recruiters.
These products include:
Highly effective job placement ads (recruiters tell me LinkedIn ads generate 2-3X the quality of candidates of other ad placements) Licensing LinkedIn Recruiter, the recruiter's "secret weapon" which lets corporate HR managers and staffing professionals search, find, and source candidates Branded career pages - an offering that lets companies of all sizes create a highly personalized candidate portal within the LinkedIn garden of professionals Talent Pipeline, a new feature set within LinkedIn Recruiter which lets recruiters manage the entire process of "candidate relationship management" - a hot new application area within corporate HR.
And the company has much more to come.
The Corporate Talent Acquisition Market
Corporate recruiters are in a war for talent. Lloyds of London's 2011 risk assessment survey points out that "Talent and Skills Shortages" are the #2 rated risk among 100 business risks today (following the risk of "losing customers.")
Despite the high unemployment rate in most countries, companies tell us over and over that there is a paradoxical mismatch between demand and supply of skills. And great candidates are not looking for work.
And the cost of sourcing and recruiting is very high.
The average employer spends over $3500 per hire on all areas of recruiting (from our Talent Acquisition Factbook®), and the spending is much higher in executive positions. This means the entire US marketplace for talent acquisition is around $130 billion by our estimates, so LinkedIn still has a lot of whitespace to cover.
I just finished meeting with the head of corporate recruiting for Pfizer (who is on LinkedIn's advisory council) and she reinforced that LinkedIn's network is truly global and has become one of their primary tool for finding great candidates.
Pioneering the shift from cloud-based software to BigData applications.
LinkedIn is benefiting from something else here. The company understands that its future relies in leveraging BigData and the power of the network over the existing markets for cloud-based HR or talent acquisition software.
Raj de Datta describes the shift well in his TechCrunch article "The Rise of BigData Apps and the Fall of SaaS." The next big thing is data. BigData.
I'm not ready to write-off enterprise software businesses by any means, but ultimately cloud-based applications do become somewhat commoditized. Now that most major applications are "in the cloud," differentiation comes down to architecture, features, and level of integration with other cloud-based systems.
If you're an HR manager, can you really tell a huge difference between Oracle, SAP, Taleo, SuccessFactors, Cornerstone, SumTotal, and PeopleFluent? Workday claims they are the "next big thing" - but ultimately even new products like Workday become replaceable. This year I've talked with at least a dozen companies who are coming up for renewal on their cloud-based software and they are very willing to switch platforms. So the future of cloud-based software is wrapping all these great applications in rich, highly-integrated data.
A great example of this is trend is Salesforce.com. We are a big user, and it always bothered me that we have to clean and maintain our own database of accounts when every other Salesforce customer is doing the same thing. Voila. Salesforce acquires Jigsaw, and now Data.com is born. You can now buy data to go along with your new CRM system.
Data, unlike software, becomes increasingly valuable as you collect more. In the enterprise Human Resources market companies are dying to get more data - data about candidates, data about workforce skills and demographics, data about salaries, and data about their own brand. Once this data is integrated with your cloud-based application, the value to a client skyrockets.
And even when you do buy your brand-new cloud-based applications for talent management, you still need to load them with data in order to make them work. Not only do you have to load all types of data about your employees, you also have to load job profiles, assessments, training modules, and dozens of other types of third party data. As HCM software companies mature, they will start building and adding their own data products to their offering.
Companies in the HR space are starting to figure this out. SHL, a leading global assessment provider recently launched its new Talent Analytics "big data application." This new platform gives customers access to tens of millions of assessments to compare candidates against the market and their competitors.
Data is sticky, proprietary, and ever-increasing in value.
The acquisition of Slideshare drives even greater data value - fueling both memberships and recruiting revenue.
LinkedIn also announced the acquisition of SlideShare, a great little company that has become the "YouTube" of corporate presentations. Slideshare is an addictive application that encourages you to share your best slide sets with others.
Not only does Slideshare further ignite LinkedIn's membership business by extending the data people can add to their profiles, it also brings tremendous value to the corporate recruiting segment.
Think about this: Slideshare is a vast database of knowledge and expertise, all published through Powerpoint presentations that are easy to view, download, and share. Some of the most powerful thinkers and practitioners in all industries publish their deep expertise in SlideShare, and the content is trivially easy to find and view.
Once Slideshare is fully integrated into LinkedIn, we can expect the company to link data about slides to data about people. (The company claims that there are already 9 million content uploads and we can expect that to explode.)
Every time an individual uploads one of their favorite Powerpoint decks their "profile" becomes more valuable to others. And since people can "like" and "comment" on slide sets, LinkedIn can start to see who the real experts are throughout the network.
Imagine the power of using this information to assess someone's skills and experience. By looking at the traffic and ratings of an individual's slides, and the relative "authority" of those who link and recommend these slides, LinkedIn can create one of the most powerful expertise-networks in the world. The company has been working away on its "skills" functionality for a few years (look at the "skills" application under the "beta" link). This will further ignite LinkedIn's ability to characterize and understand who the real experts are.
Why is skills information so valuable? Because when recruiters search for candidates, one of the most important challenges they face is "finding the right skills." Companies pay search firms tens of thousands of dollars to find the best highly-skilled candidate. Putting more "skills-related" information into LinkedIn creates a new measure of authority and expertise.
(Skills have become the new currency of success. While experience and raw talent still matter, our research shows that jobs are becoming more and more specialized every year, so deep skills are what makes you succeed. Read "The End of a Job as you Know It" for more details. )
Plus, of course, Slideshare dramatically increases the amount of information each LinkedIn user can upload - making the whole network far more valuable for individuals and members.
By the way, I noticed that LinkedIn recently removed several features from its free membership service (the ability to see who clicked on your profile, for example). Every time the company adds a new type of data-driven content, LinkedIn can come up with new, higher-value membership packages as well.
LinkedIn is really firing on all cylinders. Watch the company continue to grow as it "fuels the corporate talent machine."
I would expect LinkedIn's hiring solutions segment to continue its growth as a percentage of revenue in the coming quarters. And with little competition in the BigData market for candidates, we should see this growth accelerate as the economy picks up steam.
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dfd850a18d4a7bce86e23e101d4cf9d6 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2013/01/31/ibm-launches-its-smarter-workforce-initiative/ | IBM Launches Its Smarter Workforce Initiative | IBM Launches Its Smarter Workforce Initiative
This week at IBM Connect (formerly Lotusphere), IBM launched its Smarter Workforce program, bringing together the products and services of Kenexa with IBM.
IBM pulled together a variety of products and services and launched a major campaign to position IBM as a leading provider of HR and talent management solutions.
Under the umbrella of the “Social Business,” IBM showed a set of solutions that help companies build high-value recruitment portals, assess employees, onboard them, and implement social learning solutions. And the company intends to apply heavy amounts of analytics to the solution as well (even mentioning that Watson, IBM’s cognitive computing system, would eventually help us plan our careers and select the right people!).
While the products were not detailed at the launch, it is clear that IBM has now entered the HR and talent solutions market and intends to put heavy investment into products and services.
Background on Kenexa
Kenexa, which was acquired by IBM for $1.3 billion late last year, was a company stitched together from many acquisitions. It includes several major product lines, each of which are now being integrated into various solutions within IBM:
Employee assessments and IO psychology: Kenexa offers a wide range of assessment tools and services, used for pre-hire testing and a wide variety of other talent needs. In addition to selling these as products, the company uses this knowledge to help organizations understand their culture, assess fit, and help select and develop people for improved performance. We wrote a research paper called “The Science of Fit” which describes the power of understanding job roles well and "hiring for fit," a powerful practice to improve business performance. Employee engagement tools and offerings: Kenexa has a major business developing, delivering, and analyzing employee engagement. Leveraging the experience in IO Psychology, many companies use Kenexa to understand where employee engagement is high or low, and then hire Kenexa to advise on solutions. Employment branding and recruitment outsourcing: One of Kenexa’s biggest businesses is the company’s end to end recruitment solutions. Kenexa helps companies build an employment brand, assess candidates, screen, hire, and onboard people. This is an enormous market, and Kenexa’s services are used by some of the largest companies in the world. Talent management software: Over the years, Kenexa acquired and integrated a variety of tools into an integrated platform: Kenexa BrassRing is a leading applicant tracking system; the company offers a performance and talent management system; and through its acquisition of Outstart (a provider of e-learning tools and learning content management systems), now offers learning management and learning content management.
IBM’s offerings
IBM offers an array of technologies which play in the HR market. While most of the company’s products are cross-functional, much of the IBM's Platform for Social Business plays heavily in HR solutions.
For example, companies like Electrolux and Bosch (highlighted at the launch) use IBM Connections (IBM's corporate web and social software product set) to implement their employee portal and social networking environment. Once this system is in place, these companies can use IBM’s technology to implement onboarding programs, social learning programs, and expertise directories.
If you think about other talent management vendors serving HR, many are trying to build much of the infrastructure IBM already offers. Social learning, social recruiting, social performance management, and social rewards, for example, are really special cases of social technology applied to HR practices. IBM, through its acquisition of Kenexa and new home within IBM Software, now has the technology to bring these pieces together.
IBM’s Potential Staying Power
In the analyst briefing I took the time to ask IBM’s software executives how serious they really were about the HR software market. The company has had multiple runs at the LMS market in the past, for example, and abandoned many of its early products to partner with Saba.
Well the answer was emphatic. This time they are very serious. Mike Rhodin, who runs much of IBM software, and Alistair Rennie, who runs IBM’s social software business, looked me in the eye and quite seriously stated that the company is going to put all its muscle behind The Smarter Workforce. This means focused sales teams, lots of product integration, and heavy amounts of marketing.
IBM has its own internal perspective on the needs of HR leaders. Not only does the company have deep experience in software development and analytics, the company is a leading HR and talent organization in its own right. In our own research over the years we have consistently found IBM to be a leader in employee development, leadership, talent mobility, expertise management, and many other HR practices. The company manages one of the world’s largest and most diverse workforces, handles many acquisitions each year, and continues to drive a high level of employee engagement. All this knowledge on how to manage people can potentially be infused into IBM’s customer solutions.
Finally, it’s important to recognize that IBM’s middle name is “business.” The company is not in the “Smarter Workforce” marketplace simply to sell products to HR. IBM understands deeply that HR and Talent leaders only achieve their goals when they add business value to their own organizations. So IBM has the opportunity to come to market with industry-focused, pragmatic solutions which can help many HR organizations become more relevant in their own companies.
All that said, the HR solutions and software market is highly competitive. Oracle, SAP, Workday, and many smaller focused providers have been in this market a long time and they offer proven solutions. IBM’s Smarter Workforce program will likely further fuel the fire for modern, relevant HR and talent solutions – raising the bar for everyone.
You can follow Josh Bersin to stay up to date on trends, research, and news in all areas of HR, leadership, and talent management on twitter at @josh_bersin.
This publication contains general information only and Deloitte is not, by means of this publication, rendering accounting, business, financial, investment, legal, tax, or other professional advice or services. This publication is not a substitute for such professional advice or services, nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business, you should consult a qualified professional advisor. Deloitte shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person who relies on this publication.
As used in this document, "Deloitte" means Deloitte Consulting LLP, a subsidiary of Deloitte LLP. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting.
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7f08fd08477ba80e2c5b9bc7aa5c7ca8 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2013/05/31/7-reasons-hr-technology-is-so-hot-today/ | 7 Reasons HR Technology Is So Hot Today | 7 Reasons HR Technology Is So Hot Today
We just published new research on HR technology buying trends and the market is hotter than ever. As companies start a new war for talent, this $14+ billion market continues to explode with growth. Fast fact: 57% of companies plan to make a major new HR software purchase in the next 18 months.
Here are the top 7 drivers of growth:
1. HR software systems are aging.
The average HRMS system in large companies today is more than 5 years old and more than half are over 7 years old. And enterprise software becomes nearly obsolete in seven years, leading most companies to shop around.
2. Cloud HR software is now easy to buy.
Nearly every major HR software provider now offers their solution in the cloud, making it possible for corporate HR managers to stop the frustrating cycle of upgrading systems every year or two.
This includes core HR providers such as Oracle, SAP, Workday, ADP, Ultimate, Infor (Lawson) as well as talent vendors such as CornerstoneOnDemand (grew at 61% last quarter), Silkroad, SumTotal, Lumesse, Halogen (just went public), PeopleFluent, Saba, Kenexa (owned by IBM) and many others.
And once you buy a cloud-based system, you are out of the cycle of major upgrades every few years because the vendor does this for you.
3. New User Interfaces are a top driver for replacement.
The biggest challenge HR software buyers face is the fear that people won't use the systems. Our research now shows that the #1 driver of change is the need for a more compelling, consumer-like, experience. Most of the vendor solutions now have mobile applications also, enabling employees to manage their vacation, time sheets, and employee directories on the road.
4. Companies have too many systems and are ready to consolidate.
Our new research shows that only 13% of organizations have a single HR system and on average companies have 3-4 different HR applications (one for HRMS, another for learning, another for recruiting, for example).
Vendors have gobbled each other up, making most platforms more complete than ever. The result: nearly half of the buyers we surveyed this year told us they are willing to sacrifice features for a single vendor solution.
5. The Potential for BigData Analytics is Driving Adoption
Second on the list of buying criteria is the desire to create better talent analytics. Our new research shows that while much of the core HR technology has now become a commodity, analytics is still a new area of technology and vendor solutions here vary greatly.
SAP (SuccessFactors is now a $billion business), Oracle (Fusion, PeopleSoft, and Oracle E-Business), ADP, Workday (grew at 61% last quarter), and all the other big talent management providers offer integrated analytics now, giving buyers the promise of finding a single solution at last.
Companies are ready to play "Moneyball" with their people data, and the software providers are investing heavily in this area.
6. Cloud Technology makes it Easier to Switch Vendors
Since more and more companies now have cloud-based systems for recruiting, learning, and other HR applications, it is now easier than ever to switch. Unlike traditional software which is highly customized by IT, these new systems can be replaced.
Our new research shows that 24% of the companies we surveyed are considering replacing their vendor. Yes cloud-based software is a wonderful business model - but it also reduces switching costs to some degree.
7. Talent has now become one of the most important issues on the mind of the CEO
And finally, as the global economy recovers more and more companies realize that talent is their biggest challenge. Strategic recruiting, employee development, social networking, and internal employee communications are all critical business issues.
HR software is no longer purchased to improve the efficiency of HR. Today companies buy these systems to help transform their talent strategies and directly improve employee engagement and the ability to hire.
The Market will get Hotter: Room to Grow
Our best estimates show that more than 450 million people around the world could license and use corporate HR software, yet only 55-60 million seats have been sold. So this market is still young. And every year new categories are created (social sourcing, for example), enabling the market to expand in size.
The hottest categories?
New generation of recruiting tools (social recruiting tools, assessment, BigData) Mobile applications (mobile learning, recruiting, collaboration, and employee management) Analytics (BigData tools to analyze the job market, recruitment advertising), and new tools to enable social learning, knowledge management, and training administration.
It's a great time to be buying and selling HR software today: lots of options and they are all getting better.
You can follow me to stay up to date on trends, research, and news in all areas of HR, leadership, and talent management on twitter at @josh_bersin. For more information on Bersin by Deloitte, please visit http://www.bersin.com .
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This publication contains general information only and Deloitte is not, by means of this publication, rendering accounting, business, financial, investment, legal, tax, or other professional advice or services. This publication is not a substitute for such professional advice or services, nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business, you should consult a qualified professional advisor.
Deloitte shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person who relies on this publication.
About Deloitte
As used in this document, "Deloitte" means Deloitte Consulting LLP, a subsidiary of Deloitte LLP. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting.
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284df9ce3ac5227abd273735d32a765e | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2014/04/04/the-five-elements-of-a-simply-irresistible-organization/?sh=286fb57251b1 | The Five Elements Of A 'Simply Irresistible' Organization | The Five Elements Of A 'Simply Irresistible' Organization
New Deloitte Global Human Capital Research shows that organizations today must work hard to create a meaningful, humanistic work environment to drive engagement, performance, and a magnetic attraction in the market.
And this is good business. The Great Place to Work Institute has published studies which show that the “100 best places to work” outperformed the S&P 500 by over four-fold from 1990–2009 and there’s no reason to believe this won’t continue. (“The Great Workplace,” by Michael Burchell and Jennifer Robin.)
But there’s more. There’s a personal side to this story.
We as individuals also have to take care of ourselves. Arianna Huffington’s new book Thrive (just published) can help us understand this issue. Huffington’s book and her new website The Third Metric redefines what success means: slow down, disconnect, get more sleep, and become more mindful about our lives.
“Health creates wealth,” she says. Healthy, focused people are not only happier, they make better decisions, become better leaders, and drive greater value for their organizations.
Do business leaders understand this? Are we creating a workplace which lets people thrive? In most cases, not yet.
Our research, just completed, found a tremendous gap in the area of workforce engagement, stress, and overload.
Here’s the data: 79% of businesses are worried seriously about engagement and retention (it is their #2 issue after leadership) and two-thirds of business leaders cite “the overwhelmed employee” as a top business challenge. And Gallup research shows that globally only 13% of employees are highly engaged at work.
(View the Deloitte Human Capital Dashboard to explore the data interactively.)
Despite these numbers, only 8% of large companies feel they have programs to help employees adapt. Forty percent of us men work more than 50 hours a week and 80% of men want to work fewer hours. In order to thrive, we need employers, HR departments, and CEOs to help.
While most companies haven’t dealt with this issue, some have. Fortune’s Best Companies to Work For have built amazing workplaces — environments where people literally line up to apply for jobs. These organizations have created what we call a Simply Irresistible™ workplace. They not only attract great people, they also create an environment where people can truly thrive.
After studying this issue for the last year, I’ve concluded there are five key elements of the Simply Irresistible™ organization.
1. Meaningful work.
The first and perhaps most important challenge is to give people “good work.” Jobs must give people enough autonomy to be creative and enough time to perform well. Even call center workers want time to learn, improve, and help customers.
Studies show that companies that empower employees, give them the tools to succeed, and pay well outperform those who attempt to “reduce the cost of labor.” When we pay people fairly and give them cross training they learn, help customers, and improve operations. Call center, retail, health care, and hospitality workers all benefit from this approach.
In todays’ economy nearly every business drives value through service, intellectual property, or creativity. This means people are the product, so businesses should try to design jobs which give people what author Daniel Pink calls “autonomy, mastery, and purpose.”
2. Great management.
Management is one of the most important parts of any organization, and companies have to develop and support great leadership.
Our research shows that people thrive through coaching, feedback, and opportunities to develop. Managers who criticize people, demand too much, or avoid communication create stress and fear among employees. The same can be said for old-fashioned performance appraisals, which often create fear, reduce performance, and generate stress. We have to remember the nobility of management, and help people learn to manage others well.
We also have to teach managers how to be “mindful,” and help their employees slow down and see the big picture. One of the fastest growing competencies in leadership development programs is “self-awareness,” something Arianna Huffington describes in her new book.
(Read Learning to Be Yourself for more tips. If you’re interested in the topic of modern performance management and how to motivate high performers, please read the Myth of the Bell Curve.)
3. Growth opportunities.
Among the many reasons people leave companies, one of the biggest is for lack of opportunity. Our research clearly shows that organizations which invest more heavily in training, career development, and mobility outperform their peers in almost every industry.
But it has to go further. Not everyone will move into management or get promoted – Irresistible organizations enable facilitated talent mobility. People can move from job to job without fear of failure – supported by leadership as well as HR. Today only 3% of the companies we survey deliver strong mobility programs at all levels, yet this is one of the strongest drivers of engagement and continuous learning.
Telus, one of the leading telecommunications companies in Canada, increased their engagement levels from 53% to 83% by changing their leadership philosophy, focusing on employee learning, and creating a culture of recognition and reciprocity. Dan Pontefract's book Flat Army tells this wonderful story.
What happens when you give people the opportunity to grow? People stay excited, the business becomes more agile and innovative, and high performers want to stay.
4. An inclusive, flexible, fun environment.
Companies that have ping pong tables, free food, and flexible vacation time show that they care. These benefits are fairly inexpensive to provide and they give people the freedom to work as they want to work. There are companies that have bowling alleys, and others with nap rooms (something I feel like I could use often!). Pixar, Deloitte, and WL Gore are well known for their open office spaces and highly flexible culture.
And look at Zappos’ focus on Happiness. The company is out to prove that focusing on fun and collaboration is a productive way to run a business. Zappos even offers itsZappos Insights program, an educational initiative to help companies learn how to build a meaningful, fun, inclusive environment.
Many hot Silicon Valley companies offer these kinds of benefits, and many offer far more. Here we see companies providing bus service to work, free dry cleaning delivery, personalized workstations, unlimited vacation, and health and gym facilities on campus. This is a trend we cannot stop – it’s a humane and loving way to treat people.
5. Leadership we can trust.
The fifth element is inspirational leadership.
The days of the hard-nosed, profit-obsessed CEO are slowly coming to an end. While most businesses expect people to work hard, CEOs now realize that it’s the soul of the business that inspires people to contribute. Does your company have a mission you can relate to? Do your leaders trust employees to make the right decisions?
These values of trust, consciousness, and soul start at the top.
We all have to take this challenge seriously. At a personal level it’s time for us to take care of our lives, families, and health. Focus on self-awareness, exercise, sleep, and mindfulness.
The way I see it, employee engagement is really all you have in a business.
Take a holistic look at your entire employee experience, move beyond the engagement survey, and you’ll be amazed at the result. In today’s highly competitive economy, being “irresistible” is one of the greatest competitive strengths you can have.
Keynote Presentation on "Simply Irresistible" Delivered in 2015
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I am an industry analyst and researcher focused on corporate talent and learning, HR, leadership, HR technology, and the intersection between work and life.
You can follow me to stay up to date on trends, research, and news on twitter at @josh_bersin or on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/bersin.
For more information on Bersin by Deloitte, please visit http://www.bersin.com .
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This publication contains general information only and Deloitte is not, by means of this publication, rendering accounting, business, financial, investment, legal, tax, or other professional advice or services. This publication is not a substitute for such professional advice or services, nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business, you should consult a qualified professional advisor.
Deloitte shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person who relies on this publication.
About Deloitte
As used in this document, "Deloitte" means Deloitte Consulting LLP, a subsidiary of Deloitte LLP. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting.
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f306d280e1e487197347255ff9552d01 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2014/04/10/its-time-to-rethink-the-employee-engagement-issue/ | It's Time To Rethink The 'Employee Engagement' Issue | It's Time To Rethink The 'Employee Engagement' Issue
It's time to rethink the concept of "employee engagement."
The days of the annual engagement survey are slowly coming to an end, to be replaced by a much more holistic, integrated, and real-time approach to measuring and driving high levels of employee commitment and passion.
We know this topic is big. In our 2014 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends research, 78% of business leaders rate retention and engagement urgent or important. When I talk with HR leaders they talk consistently about retention issues, they carefully watch their Glassdoor ratings, and businesses all over the world are trying to build an inclusive, passionate, multi-generational team.
In fact, I believe the issue of "engaging people well" is becoming one of the biggest competitive differentiators in business.
The change we need to make is to redefine engagement beyond an "annual HR measure" to a continuous, holistic part of an entire business strategy. If your people love their work and the environment you have created, they will treat customers better, innovate, and continuously improve your business. And today, with the increased transparency at work and the Affordable Health Care Act available, high performers can change jobs easier than ever.
The Traditional Concept of Engagement
The concepts of "employee engagement" have been with us for many years. More than 30 years ago Gallup and other companies pioneered the concept of the "engagement survey." The roots of these surveys started in the late 1800s when Fredrick Taylor, a pioneering industrial engineer, studied how people's attitude impacted their productivity in the steel industry.
Today there are hundreds of different survey providers, and most offer validated surveys and benchmarking tools to help you assess your employee's level of "engagement."
While this is a good thing to do, most companies now tell us that this process is not keeping up. It's not detailed enough, it isn't real-time, and it doesn't consider all the work related issues which drive employee commitment. A new breed of engagement tools vendors, models, books, and workshops has emerged - all focused on building what we call today's "Irresistible Organization."
The Forbes E-book: Find And Keep Your Dream Job The Definitive Careers Guide From Forbes encompasses every aspect of the job hunt, from interview to promotion. Written by some of Forbes' best careers and leadership writers, it is available now for download.
Rethinking the Concept: Think Holistically
Creating a high performance work environment is a complex problem. We have to communicate a mission and values, train managers and leaders to live these values, and then carefully select the right people who fit. And once people join, we have to continuously improve, redesign, and tweak the work environment to make it modern, humane, and enjoyable.
And despite the simple models engagement vendors use, the reasons for low engagement and turnover are varied.
• Some companies are going through transition and the leadership and management hasn't re-engaged people.
• In others the workload is too high and the performance management process is flawed.
• Others have a lack of investment in development and talent mobility, making it difficult for high performers to advance.
• Some have a non-inclusive culture (perhaps as a result of history) and cannot attract and retain today's more diverse workforce.
• Others just have old fashioned working conditions that simply make work difficult.
Our research shows that building a highly engaged workforce takes combination of many things, each impacting people in different ways. And with the influx of younger workers and the proliferation of technology at work, the whole environment has to be more flexible and transparent. While the engagement survey may be useful for benchmarking, they typically just don't address all these issues. (Read our research on the "Five Elements of the Irresistible Organization" for more details.)
There is an old truism "people leave managers, not organizations." Research suggests this is no longer true. When people leave it is usually a combination of the organization and all its elements that cause turnover. A bad manager can force someone to leave, but usually there are many other factors that create low performance or a departure.
New research by CultureAmp found that development opportunities and leadership have 3-4X greater impact on retention than your relationship with your immediate manager. TinyPulse research found that peers have much greater impact on commitment than managers.
We now operate in much flatter organizations and often team leaders are our managers so the traditional idea that "engagement is driven by a manager" is now out of date.
The Word "Engagement" is Limiting
I would suggest that using the word "engagement" often limits our thinking. It assumes that our job is to reach out and "engage" people, rather than to build an organization that is exciting, fulfilling, meaningful, and fun.
Plus we aren't just looking to get people "engaged", we want them to be "married." That is, fully committed.
Our research shows that we may need to change the way we manage people (end appraisals?), change the work environment (open offices? nap rooms? ping pong tables?), and change who we hire (are we hiring the right people for our mission, culture and values? are we assessing well?). All these things tend to go well beyond the typical engagement survey.
Financial institutions today tell us that they are having a harder time recruiting people because they are no longer "cool" places to work. This isn't a traditional problem of "engagement," its one of identity, mission, and culture.
Have you ever worked for an organization that got you excited to come to work every day?
Ben Horowitz, in his new book "The Hard Thing about Hard Things" talks about how his team at Opsware worked 7 days a week for six months to save the company. This wasn't a problem of "engagement" - it was one of the most thrilling experiences these people ever had.
When I worked at IBM in the 1980s, I was proud to be an "IBMer." The company wasn't perfect, but it took care of us. I bought a whole set of white shirts and dark suits, wearing them daily like a uniform - proud to put it on and carry that IBM business card.
Later I had the same commitment and passion during my years at Sybase, and then again at two startups and at Bersin & Associates. I always had a conversation in my head about "do I fit here?" and "am I part of a mission I can relate to?" which got me engaged. Yes, sometimes management issues got in the way, but it was always my ability to contribute, innovate, and enjoy the people that made me happy.
Companies that understand this topic go beyond engagement surveys: they re-design jobs, they change the work environment, they add new benefits, they continuously develop managers, and they invest in people. They are "mission-driven" and they make sure people are screened for culture and job fit (the wrong person cannot be "engaged" regardless of what HR does).
Many industries are trying to re-engage their people. Financial institutions are redefining their mission and values. Pharmaceutical companies are shifting from "drug companies" to "health and wellness companies." As Joey Reiman discusses in "The Story of Purpose," people are not motivated by the bottom line - they want to feel like they're a part of something bigger than themselves.
New Tools and Approaches
While the engagement survey is not going away yet, it is now being replaced by new tools and techniques that measure happiness, alignment, and job satisfaction in real time. These tools include rapid pulse surveys, analytics applications that correlate retention and performance to work factors, and day to day tools that let people openly express their feelings.
Think about how we manage customer happiness: we have NetPromoter, customer satisfaction, and lots of real time feedback tools. We need precisely the same type of "sensing" system for employees.
Here's a well honed example: the Japanese NikoNiko calendar, pioneered at Toyota. This little daily tool gives managers a daily look at how happy people are.
When production people see a lot of red faces, they go back and figure out what happened. Maybe the heat wasn't turned up that day, or maybe a manager was in a bad mood because he or she had an argument at home.
Some of the vendors developing these tools include CultureAmp, TinyHR, TemboSocial, BlackbookHR, Achievers, Globoforce, Roundpegg, IBM, and a variety of others. I visited a company two weeks ago who build their own internal "employee sensing" system that shows how well employees like each other, their level of trust, and who they collaborate with in a real-time basis.
Remember: People Are The Product
Part of this shift is redefining our perspective on an employee. Rather than consider people as "hired hands" we want to "engage," (the whole term "human resources" has this old fashioned connotation) high-engagement companies understand that employees are the essence of products and services. They develop, deliver, and support what our customers experience every day.
We can't "retain" people, we can only "attract them." We can't "engage them" but we can "inspire and support them." We can't only "train them" but we can "enable them to learn" and "give them the opportunities to develop."
Let's change our thinking and move beyond the concept of engagement. If we really achieve the goal of making our organizations "Irresistible" we can make work fun, meaningful, and enriching for everyone.
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Stay up to date on trends, research, and news on Twitter at @josh_bersin or on LinkedIn.
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a08deca88bbd2127282d7c5bd13ee79f | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2014/06/25/quantified-self-meet-the-quantified-employee/ | Quantified Self: Meet the Quantified Employee | Quantified Self: Meet the Quantified Employee
We are suddenly addicted to measuring things about ourselves: the "Quantified Self" movement is red hot. The Fitbit, Jawbone, and Nike devices that measure your footsteps and daily activities are selling like hotcakes.
Amazingly, Pew Internet Research believes that 21% of all adults now use technology track their own activities for exercise or fitness. I am finding those little wristbands on business professionals and homemakers almost everywhere I go. I personally started using Strava to track my own bike riding about six months ago and I admit it, it's addicting (even after a recent crash).
Google announced a new set of Android features which connect watches to mobile devices to cars to mobile devices, and we know Apple iWatch is coming. Kronos has launched tools to monitor the heart rate of nurses and even Salesforce.com now has an open API to help companies track and store employee real-time data. Virgin Atlantic just announced that flight attendants in first class will wear Google Glass to help passengers stay up on flight status.
The Quantified Self movement is accelerating. (Read more about the Google Android announcements here.) Check out #quantifiedself on Twitter if you want to learn more.
Not only are we instrumenting our bodies, we are instrumenting everything else. Our homes are becoming monitored by tools like Nest, and more than 1.2 billion people now use Facebook. Facebook itself is an "instrumentation" system - it encourages us to post more and more data about where we are, what we're doing, and who we are with. And Twitter, which now has around 260 million users, has become a self-description engine. When you tweet you broadcast your location, what you're reading and thinking, and often your photo.
The Quantified Self Comes to Work
Well, the Quantified Self movement has come to work. Each day day more and more tools are being developed to help employers monitor, track, and better understand the activity of workers. These tools are real-time, often anonymous, and usually invisible. And many of the startups in Human Resources believe that bringing the Quantified Self movement to HR is the next big thing.
Here are some examples.
1. Employee Monitoring
Companies have been monitoring our internet access for years. But now they're monitoring our daily activity, who we meet with, and where we go.
The New York Times just published a great article about a new set of tools that lets employers monitor location. These tools, which fit inside an employee badge, tell your company who you're meeting with and how "social" you are. So far companies using this technology have already discovered that more social people (people who eat lunch at bigger tables) are better at customer service.
Monitoring helps employees reduce theft. NCR's "restaurant guard" monitors transactions to help reduce in-store theft. Hitachi has a location monitoring product they have sold for years - used to measure collaboration and help HR improve the work environment. If we all start wearing FitBit and other such devices, I'm not sure why employers wouldnt monitor those data streams too.
Some companies are even more creative. A well known company I recently met with (I will leave them anonymous) developed a tool to monitor the pattern of employee emails. They look at everyone's "To" list and "cc" list and also who they are receiving email "from." Their goal is not to read anyone's email, but rather to study the patterns of communication in the company. This is a "culture-driven" company and they are using the information to understand who are the "connectors" in the organization and what patterns of communication seem to lead to higher levels of performance.
This "data exhaust" we produce at work is valuable stuff - and as more companies implement Talent Analytics (I call this discipline BigData in HR), we can expect this data to become more valuable every day. An interesting new performance management company, BetterWorks, even thinks they can create a "quantified employee" software system improve goal-setting and team alignment.
2. Real Time Employee Engagement
The second explosive area for the Quantified Employee is providing real-time feedback on the work environment. Traditionally companies have used annual engagement surveys to capture this information: that process is rapidly becoming too slow, too coarse, and just not very useful.
Replacing this, a new set of tools (most run on mobile devices) let you speak up about how you feel at work on a real time basis. These tools (companies like CultureAmp, Achievers, BlackbookHR, TinyPulse, OfficeVibe, TemboSocial, Hppy, Waggl, 15Five and many others) are hitting the market like a storm. Companies of all sizes are starting to move away from annual engagement surveys and putting in place real-time feedback systems.
In fact, one company, who I won't name yet, is even building a tool like Secret (the anonymous sharing app which enabled Julie Ann Horvath to disclose the sexism and intimidation which led to the resignation of the CEO) which lets you anonymously comment on any activity at work through your mobile phone. Think about Glassdoor in real-time with any information you wish to share. Pretty soon you won't need to deploy an engagement survey: your employees will be "Yelping" about their boss and their work environment all day on public websites.
These are all good things. The Japanese Niko Niko calendar, pioneered in Japan, has given managers real-time feedback on their teams for years. Anything that frees up information and gives people transparency and freedom to share what they feel will make management more accountable and improve the work environment. And let's face it, people often won't speak up publicly but they will confidentially.
3. Employee Retention and BigData Monitoring Tools
The third wave of "quantified self" tools is coming from a new breed of companies (Entelo, OrgStars, and others) which mine social data and apply intelligence to figure out if you're thinking about changing jobs. These tools monitor all your aggregated social activity and try to develop a "score" which tells employers if you're looking for a new job. The benefit? Fast-growing companies can quickly figure out who is thinking about leaving and try to prevent retention problems. LinkedIn
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And many tools go even further. Companies like Evolv On Demand, IBM, Visier, PeopleAnswers, and others now provide turnkey BigData analytics using internal HR data. These companies help you understand the characteristics of high performers to help with management tools, better hiring practices, and pre-hire assessment. Think about these as "off the shelf" analysis tools to help you understand your workforce in detail.
SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics product and Workday's new BigData Analytics product are designed to help companies to this work with their own internal data. Our research shows that around 4% of companies are already doing some form of predictive analytics based on internal HR data, and this is growing rapidly.
I just talked with a company that now does secret analysis of employee emails and messages to score and rate where they go. One of the things they found was that sales people who send fewer external emails to prospects and spend less time on the phone sell less. Easy way to monitor sales teams.
Where Will This Go?
So where is all this going? Should we be worried? Will your employer know so much that you'll have to hire a lawyer and read your employment contract to decide who owns your data?
Ultimately this is a very good thing. Remember that employers already have plenty of data about all of us: our job history, employment history, salary, performance evaluations, and when we clocked in and out each day. If companies start using this information to improve the workplace, we'll see better management, better hiring, and improved workplace conditions. Already, Talent Analytics projects are becoming one of the biggest new focus areas for HR.
Should we worry about employees "Yelping" about their boss online? No. Let's face it - today people can complain publicly about almost anything, so bringing transparency into the workplace in a more structured way lets management and leadership act more quickly to resolve problems. Hate your boss? Pretty soon you won't have to clam up and just deal with it in silence.
I know these tools will raise many issues about data ownership and workplace privacy. But we already give up much privacy to companies like Google and Facebook so in most cases these tools are just extensions of our consumer life every day.
Our research shows that transparency in HR is almost always a good thing. Old fashioned employment practices like annual performance appraisals (given by managers), secret lists of high-potentials, and politically charged talent reviews which lead to secret salary decisions can be made more accurate with a little more "light" from the outside world.
Not to Quantified Self: Meet the Quantified Employee. Today's 21st Century workplace is getting more instrumented, more transparent, and more data driven every day.
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About the Author: Josh Bersin is the founder and Principal of Bersin by Deloitte, a leading research and advisory firm.
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c7e5ff17c818a9862d7ab983f817f731 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2014/08/30/interview-with-reid-hoffman-about-managing-talent-in-the-networked-age/ | Reid Hoffman: How To Manage Talent In The Networked Age | Reid Hoffman: How To Manage Talent In The Networked Age
Exclusive interview with Reid Hoffman, Chairman of LinkedIn and Author of The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, by Josh Bersin, Principal and Founder, Bersin by Deloitte.
The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age is a best-selling new book written by Reid Hoffman (Chairman and Co-Founder of LinkedIn), Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh. As co-founder of LinkedIn and a board member of several fast growing Silicon Valley companies, Hoffman has recruited and managed people in one of the most demanding and competitive talent markets in the world.
In August, I sat down and interviewed Reid, and I wanted to share some of his insights from the book in his own personal words..
Josh Bersin: Reid why did you felt compelled to write this book, given your active role at LinkedIn and the venture community? Why do you feel this is such an imperative today?
Reid Hoffman: I was struck by the fact that very few employees feel like they can have an honest career conversation with their managers. They simply don’t have the right language and framework for building a high trust relationship. The book is our attempt to crystallize our own experiences into a practical framework for managers. When honesty and trust prevail at a company, employees will be able to do their best, entrepreneurial work. And we believe the way you get to this point where everyone can work at their highest level is if you define a mutually beneficial, explicit “alliance” with your employees.
Bersin: You talk about the change in employment contract to that of an "alliance" relationship, similar to a sports team. My experience is that people still do want stable employment and a job they feel they can call "home" - what about the people who want that kind of long term career and feel very committed to their companies?
Hoffman: The Alliance is all about building an honest relationship based on mutual trust, mutual investment, and mutual benefit. These principles apply whether the employee expects to stay at a particular company for a couple of years (likely on a Transformational tour of duty), or a couple of decades (what we call a Foundational tour of duty). In the world of sports, some players switch organizations all the time, but others stay with the same club their entire career. Yet even those franchise players don’t sign a single “lifetime” contract when they join the team; they serve multiple tours of duty that span their career on the team, so that both sides consciously re-commit to each other after incremental objectives are met.
The principles behind the Alliance started here in Silicon Valley, but they are spreading into jobs and industries all over the world, wherever employees and companies want to be entrepreneurial and adaptable. The more critical adaptability is in your industry, the more of your employees you will want on defined tours of duty.
Bersin: Your discussion about "tours of duty" is very analogous to what we often call "facilitated talent mobility" in companies. How can a global company implement this kind of model when there are so many options and places someone could go? Who should orchestrate these moves - the manager? HR? And does everyone get to take these tours or only high potentials and high performers?
Hoffman: The key to orchestrating successful tours of duty is the individual manager—that’s where the burden of talent management lies on a day to day basis. Our notion of a “Transformational” tour of duty is that upon completing a mission objective over a realistic period of time (usually 3-5 years), the employee will transform both his career and the company’s growth trajectory. This requires a deep knowledge of the employee’s goals and aspirations, which only his direct manager is likely to possess.
Of course, it is extremely helpful for the manager if HR supports programs to promote the Alliance framework throughout the organization. The Alliance doesn’t replace traditional HR processes, and things like regular check-ins between manager and employee work best when integrated into the existing infrastructure and performance management process. Nonetheless, individual managers can use the Alliance with her employees even if the organization hasn’t yet officially adopted the model.
Historically, most organizations have reserved personalized management like the Alliance for high potentials and entrepreneurial employees. Certainly, that’s the main focus of personalized tour of duty conversations. But we believe the ideal is to roll out a version of this model to employees at all levels.
Bersin: In an organization that implements the "tours of duty" model there will always be internal candidates competing against external candidates. How do we deal with the need for companies to hire outside experts for critical jobs vs. moving internal candidates who may not be as qualified? What is the criteria for external vs. internal or should internal candidates always get the job?
Hoffman: The goal should always be to choose the best candidate for the job. However, most companies and managers underestimate the value of internal candidates and are thus too quick to jump to an external hire. An internal candidate generally brings many subtle strengths to the table that an external candidate simply can’t. Not only does an internal candidate know and thrive in the company’s existing corporate culture, he is likely to have strong connectivity within the organization. Continuity matters—people who have been in a foxhole have the kind of trust and shared experiences that enable rapid decision-making and execution.
Bersin: At LinkedIn you had the opportunity to hire the "best of the best" because the company was growing so fast and the stock was growing. Most companies have a much less consistent level of performance and their employment brand may be weak in many areas, so they often have to hire second or third tier candidates. How does the "Alliance" work when the employer couldn't get the "very best person?"
Hoffman: Because of all the attention we’ve received recently, people often forget that for much of its existence, LinkedIn wasn’t considered a sexy company. We had to find things other than sex appeal and hype to bring in the best employees.
Studies consistently show that the most important factor in employee happiness is the relationship the employee has with his immediate manager. It doesn’t matter how many perks a company throws at employees or how much the press writes about the business, if your boss treats you badly, you won’t be happy. This gives every company, even those with weak “brands,” a chance to attract great people, as long as you offer the promise of career transformation.
A little-known company with a realistic framework that appeals to entrepreneurial employees is going to be more attractive than a famous company that treats its people like disposable assets.
Conversely, the Alliance is all about bringing in the best person to accomplish a specific mission. It’s not about stockpiling people with attractive resumes. The ex-McKinsey consultant or Harvard Business School graduate isn’t necessarily the best person to accomplish the mission. Managers should focus on finding a person that fits the mission rather than winning a misguided “war” for generic “talent.”
Bersin: Your discussion of the Alumni and Employee Intelligence network is very compelling - but so many companies don't do this well. What is holding them back and why don't they do this in a more consistent way?
Hoffman: In a word, fear.
Far too many companies focus on what might go wrong when employees are encouraged to build their external networks, rather than on the value of what will go right. This compliance mentality tries to eliminate downside rather than creating upside. Knowing people who work at other companies—including competitors-- is enormously valuable, and are only becoming more so as the world gets more connected.
The irony is that Alumni and Network Intelligence Networking is one of the lowest-cost, highest-return activities a company can undertake! Most of the necessary tools are free.
Bersin: If you could talk with the CEO of IBM, GM, GE, or another very large global company - one which may have hundreds of years of experience and a very complex model for careers and engagement, what would you advise these CEOs? How should they think differently to thrive in the network age?
Hoffman: In the networked age, people—and their networks—are truly your most important asset. The way to win is to adopt the “mutual investment mindset.” Invest in your employees so that they’ll view you as an ally and invest in you. As Jeff Immelt (CEO, GE) told us, “The key to sustained performance is developing competitive leaders in every era. The Alliance captures the essence of modern talent development: trust and mutual value creation helps both employer and employee compete in the marketplace.”
Many of today’s Silicon Valley companies use the Alliance to get the most out of their talent; established companies must do the same to compete in the global marketplace.
Thank you Reid, these are important ideas and tips for organizations everywhere.
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a476ebd3921ec223b0a0254df716634d | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2015/02/01/geeks-arrive-in-hr-people-analytics-is-here/ | The Geeks Arrive In HR: People Analytics Is Here | The Geeks Arrive In HR: People Analytics Is Here
The old fashioned fuddy-duddy HR department is changing. The Geeks have arrived.
Today, for the first time in the fifteen years I've been an analyst, human resources departments are getting serious about analytics. And I mean serious.
I was in a meeting several weeks ago in San Francisco and we had eight PhD statisticians, engineers, and computer scientists together, all working on people analytics for their companies. These are serious mathematicians and data scientists trying to apply data science to the people side of their businesses.
This last week I had another similar meeting and we had three of the world's leading insurance companies, two large retailers, three health care companies, and two manufacturing companies with serious mathematicians and scientists assigned to HR.
What's going on?
As I recently discussed in the article "How People Management is Replacing Talent Management?" there is a major shift taking place in the market for people analytics. After years of talking about the opportunity to apply data to people decisions, companies are now stepping up and making the investment. And more exciting than that, the serious math and data people are flocking to HR.
A little history is in order.
The area of HR analytics, talent analytics, or as it is now called "people analytics" has been around for a long time. As an analyst (and former analytics product manager) I've been talking with companies about how to measure learning and HR for a decade. Back in 2005, after several frustrating years trying to figure out how to measure training, I wrote a book called The Training Measurement Book, which sets the stage for L&D teams to move beyond the traditional Kirkpatrick measurement model. Today learning organizations continue to try to analyze the impact and effectiveness of training, but it no longer stands alone.
If you look back in time, ten years ago companies tried to build "HR Analytics" systems (typicall called HR data warehouses) to help companies look at simple metrics like "total headcount," "time to hire" and "retention rate" and clean up their messy, often inaccurate people data. Quite a few companies built these databases, but they were primarily used to be a single system of record across the many HR platforms in place.
In the 1990s vendors like PeopleSoft, Oracle, and NCR/Teradata built analytics products to support this market. They didn't sell very well, primarily because companies had such complex HR systems they didn't have the budget or IT support to build the HR data warehouse. (Some companies did do this, and they have been benefiting from this for many years.)
About five years ago the book Moneyball came out, and we started a global marketplace called "Big Data." Tools like Hadoop, R, and other parallel data management tools became productized and industries like marketing, advertising, and finance started to analyze massive amounts of data. Much of this started at Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and other internet companies who simply had to analyze enormous amounts of data to run their businesses.
Along the way the term "Data Science" was invented, and today there are hundreds of jobs for "Data Scientists." (Typically defines as people who understand information management, Big Data tools, statistics, and modeling - a rare breed.)
During the last ten years we watched the discussion with HR stay very tactical, focused on operational reporting and simply fixing the mess of incompatible HR systems we have. There were many HR and learning analytics presentations and a few conferences, but most of the focus was helping technical practitioners improve their reporting systems. The idea of predictive analytics was little more than ROI studies to look at whether a training program worked.
(Full disclosure, I was the head of product management for two companies that built advanced learning analytics solutions in the early 2000s.)
Suddenly around 2011, with the focus on Big Data, we sensed a shift in the market. To understand how well predictive analytics was taking hold, we started our early research on "Big Data in HR" and developed a maturity model (it was published in the Fall of 2012). We discovered a world of "Haves" and "Have Nots." A small number of companies were investing heavily in predictive people analytics, but most were barely getting started.
The whole idea of our focus on "Big Data in HR" was to help HR organizations realize that they, too, could enjoy the wave of interest in Moneyball and BigData. HR is not as interesting a topic as homeland security or cyberwarfare, but it's a big area of spending (more than $4 trillion is spent on payroll around the world) so there's a lot of opportunity in this huge data set. And the world of "People Analytics" was born.
There is a deep history of data analysis in the HR profession, starting with Frederick Taylor in the late 1800s. The article "The Datafication of HR" describes this evolution, and I think everyone in this space should read this article and get to know the history. Today we are standing on the shoulders of some giants and very innovative thinkers - they just didn't have computers to help.
Today, while the topic is hot, HR teams are just starting to get good at analytics. The problem has not been the concept, but rather the focus. We spent far too much time trying to measure HR and L&D spending, and figure out which HR programs were adding value. While that seems interesting HR managers, typically business people just don't care. What they want is information that helps them run the company better: "Get me the right people into the job, make them productive and happy, and get them to help us attract more customers and drive more revenue. I don't care if your L&D program has a 200% ROI or not."
(Slideshare History of People Analytics: The Datafication of HR: People Science is Here )
We now see this as a huge trend, so we launched a focused research area on this topic. With the help of my partner Karen O'Leonard and others on our team, we launched a series of industry studies on what we called "Talent Analytics." Our biggest report, entitled High-Impact Talent Analytics, established the first-ever research-based maturity model for analytics. It showed that there were a small set of companies (less than 5% of the market) that were way ahead of the curve. These advanced companies were looking at people-related data in a very strategic way, and they were making far better decisions about who to hire, who to promote, how much to pay people, and much more.
Since then, interest in this market has exploded. And I mean like an atomic bomb. Everyone is now talking about it, and the whole concept has changed.
A few weeks ago I had a meeting with five major Silicon Valley and New York companies who are focused in this area, and the room was filled with statistics PhDs, engineers (like me), and I/O psychologist PhDs. Thus the title of this article:
The geeks have arrived, and we're all happier for it.
At this point, entering 2015, I believe "The Geeks have Arrived." Statisticians, mathematicians, and engineers have entered the people analytics space.
In this meeting I recently attended, the practitioners, who are among the leaders in this space, were all experienced in bringing together data, cleaning it up, and doing all types of analysis. Of course their companies have various issues with data quality, systems, and infrastructure - but they, as a group "get it." They understand the potential, they understand the problem, and they have the skills to get work done. And they are not just analyzing HR issues, they are analyzing the business.
Today this new business function is called "People Analytics." And over time, I believe it doesn't even belong within HR. While it may reside in HR to begin with, over time this team takes responsible for analysis of sales productivity, turnover, retention, accidents, fraud, and even the people-issues that drive customer retention and customer satisfaction.
High tech companies now know why top engineers quit and how to build compensation and work environments to get people to stay. Financial services companies are now analyzing why certain people commit fraud and what environmental or hiring issues might contribute to such violations. Product companies are now analyzing the demographic, educational, and experiential factors that correlate with high performing sales people and why top sales people quit. Health care companies are looking at why certain hospitals or departments have higher infection rates and what people issues are behind these problems. Manufacturers and product companies are looking at the patterns of email traffic and communications to understand how high performing managers behave and what work styles result in the highest levels of performance.
These are all real-world business problems, not HR problems. The data which helps support these decisions includes experience, demographics, age, family status, as well as training, personality, intelligence, and dozens of other factors. More and more this will include data on email communications, employee sentiment, and ad-hoc feedback.
Many of the factors which contribute to fraud or turnover have nothing to do with the people - they are environmental. Where is the manager physically located? Who else is hiring in this location? So People Analytics requires a look at external data, not just internal data.
This is why this function eventually belongs outside of HR, it is really a part of a company's bigger "business analytics" team.
Just for grins I did a Google Trends search on the terms HR Analytics, Talent Analytics, and People Analytics, and look at what I found. "People Analytics" is winning.
(History of Google searches for People Analytics, Talent Analytics, and HR Analytics. The blue one is winning.)
As we talk about in our research, this is a huge market opportunity for business - one that is just beginning. Vendors of all shapes and sizes are starting to grow, and most of the large platform providers now include predictive analytics tools embedded in their core HR software. (Flight risk indicators are a good example - not necessarily accurate yet, but the right idea.)
And exciting new companies are joining the marketplace. (Read People Analytics Heats Up for more on all the vendor activity.) Not only are the large ERP players involved, but serious software entrepreneurs are joining the market. Last week I met with two senior software executives (both from large search engine companies and other companies they had sold) now entering the market for HR engagement analytics and measurement systems. I wont mention the company yet (it's not yet launched), but this is a company that is likely to bring serious software engineering to the people analytics market.
While most HR organizations are still struggling to clean up their data and build their teams, the momentum is coming on strong. And technical talent has now figured out that the old-fashioned backwater HR department may be one of the most exciting places to work.
We'll be doing a lot more research on this topic over the coming years, but let me simply state clearly "The Geeks have Arrived: People Analytics is Here."
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511e3524ada44643f231336223ef9ae3 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2015/08/26/employee-feedback-is-the-killer-app-a-new-market-emerges/ | Feedback Is The Killer App: A New Market and Management Model Emerges | Feedback Is The Killer App: A New Market and Management Model Emerges
A new market has emerged: Employee feedback apps for the corporate marketplace. These tools are powerful and disruptive, and they have the potential to redefine how we manage our organizations.
In this article I discuss this explosive new market and talk about some of the innovative vendors helping make this market grow.
As the economy grows and the job market gets hotter, employee engagement and retention have become a top priority. As I discuss in Why Culture is the Hottest Topic in Business, most CEOs are bending over backwards to make their company a "great place to work." Free food, unlimited vacation, yoga classes, and lavish educational benefits are becoming common… and in some cases, even wages are starting to rise.
As attention shifts toward the health and happiness of staff, employee engagement remains surprisingly low. Gallup tells us that only about 1/3 of employees are actively engaged, Glassdoor data shows an average engagement of a C+ (3.1 out of 5), and Quantum Workplace believes engagement is at its lowest level in eight years.
If we look at employee ratings of employers as a whole, we find that performance follows a bell curve. I've analyzed data from Glassdoor, a website which lets employees rate their employers, and you can see the distribution below. While some companies are doing very well, many are doing quite poorly -- and the data shows no easy-to-spot patterns. The highly engaged organizations are all shapes and sizes: all industries, all sizes, and all ages.
Why is there such a wide variation in employee engagement and retention?
The answer is clear: building a highly engaged workforce is difficult.
As described in the Deloitte University Press article Simply Irresistible, there are 20 distinct factors that contribute to employee engagement, ranging from the quality of the jobs to the quality of management, career progression and opportunity, learning culture, and level of recognition. So these highly engaged companies are doing a lot of things right.
And the problem is getting harder. Today employees are more empowered, mobile, and demanding than ever.
New research by the MRI network shows that 90% of recruiters surveyed believe that “candidates are now in charge” – the highest this metric has been in five years. So if you aren’t thinking about how to keep your people happy, they might pick up and leave (or even worse, stay and undermine you). Similar research shows that unhappy employees who stay can be a bigger problem than those who leave – they have an oversized negative impact on everyone else.
What can we do? How can a CEO, manager, or even HR team keep up with everything everyone needs?
The Solution: Employee Feedback as the Killer App
Our research shows that a new approach has arrived: open, anonymous, employee feedback.
Just as customer feedback has transformed the customer experience, employee feedback is transforming the employee experience.
Consider what feedback and ratings have done for our lives as consumers. We can "like," "rate," or "evaluate" almost everything we buy - leading to a better shopping experience, better customer service, and products that more quickly adapt to our needs.
And we, as humans, thrive on feedback. Research now shows that when we don't get feedback at work, we become nervous, suspicious, and generally less productive. We worry about what other people will say and we feel uncertain about our future. In fact, one study shows that when people are put in sensory deprivation conditions and get no feedback, they start to become psychotic! This is what happens at work when we don't know where we stand.
GE, which started the traditional performance management many companies are redesigning, now believes "Fast Feedback" is the key to its future. The company is piloting an app called PD@GE to let people post notes of encouragement, advice or criticism under categories like “insight,” “consider” and “continue.”
In the case of employees, the tools being unleashed are likely to change the way we run our businesses, totally redefining the way we think of "employee engagement."
Redefining the Term "Feedback"
Let's talk about the word Feedback. At work the word often has a negative connotation. When a manager has a problem with someone, they often pull them aside and say “hey, let me give you a little feedback.” And most likely our heart starts to flutter and we immediately get worried and defensive.
In this new world we have to redefine this word and look at Feedback as a positive, constructive concept that can unleash innovation, solve problems, and create empowerment in the organization.
As one consultant put it to me, we should use the concept that "Feedback is a Gift."
Feedback is a gift to give (i.e., we should give it kindly and with respect) and Feedback is a gift to receive (we open it carefully, take it with respect, and thank the giver).
If we think about Feedback in this way, we can open the floodgates to constructive suggestions – and find a myriad of ways to run our operation better.
And most employees really want more. Research by Workboard (results shown below), a provider of feedback and employee management tools, found that highly engaged employees are getting more positive, constructive feedback by a mile.
At an organizational level, is it scary to let employees can give us their opinion whenever they want? Of course it is – but that horse has left the barn. People now post information about their workplace on a variety of online sites (Glassdoor, Facebook , and others) or share information privately with their friends.
Learning From The Ratings Economy
To better understand this trend it's instructive to look at the consumer marketplace.
Today we live in a Ratings Economy – we can rate almost anything. (Even the US Postal Service now uses Yelp.)
On Uber, for example, you rate the driver and the driver rates you. This helps Uber find problem drivers, but also lets the company find problem customers. (Uber drivers have told me that riders who are rated poorly actually have a harder time getting rides – I haven’t confirmed this but it certainly would make sense.)
eBay pioneered this idea by letting buyers rate sellers and sellers rate buyers. Anyone who has done business on eBay knows how effective this system can be, and many consider eBay one of the first trusted, quality-oriented, and service-centric marketplaces.
NetPromoter or NPS has become a major force in the ratings economy. With one question (“How well would you recommend this product to others?”) we can evaluate any product or service. In the case of the employee experience, vendors have created an eNPS (employee net promoter score) as a single measure. The eNPS simply asks “how well would you recommend this company to a friend?”
This Ratings Economy has encouraged many companies to let people rate managers, programs, courses, and internal systems. Laszlo Bock, in his book WorkRules, describes how Google encourages employees to rate their managers, for example.
As the ratings economy has expanded, we've learned more about how to optimize the feedback mechanism:
As ratings and text feedback comes in, people can often Upvote or Downvote others’ comments, creating a “double-loop” dynamic. The organization can see which suggestions are highly regarded, helping to prioritize input and which actions to take. You can often “Rate the Ratings.” Yelp, for example, lets you rate reviews as "useful, funny, or cool." This lets raters gain greater credibility, and raises the bar for “useful feedback” from others. Amazon.com lets us see the “most helpful reviews,” by letting readers evaluate the usefulness of reviews. Systems let you self-rate your own comments. One vendor lets employees rate their employer in categories and then asks them to go back and prioritize each answer - forcing the employee prioritize his or her input. Social systems now “Rate the Rater,” a mechanism which shows what kind of evaluator you are. People who write highly valued ratings in Amazon, for example, become “Hall of Fame Reviewers” – making their voice more credible than others. Sentiment analysis and text analytics tools can monitor and help censor unsavory comments. If someone is abusive, releases confidential information, or swears, the software can find this behavior and remove it before it appears in public. Several vendors (Kanjoya for example) offer such tools and others (such as Bettercompany.co, Getthememo.com, Glint, and TinyPulse) monitor and police comments for abuse or let an administrator review comments before they are publicized.
So Feedback is not a new idea and the mechanics are generally well understood. As these systems grow and evolve in the consumer marketplace, they have now entered the corporation. If you think about the Feedback Economy in the context of business, it feels more like an “always-on” suggestion box.
The Need for Anonymity
We can’t talk about feedback and ratings systems without discussing the issue of anonymity.
While ratings in a consumer website may or may not be anonymous, at work anonymity is critical. In the consumer world, if you poorly review a restaurant or "down rate" a driver, there are likely no major consequences to you – in fact it can be a good thing, because the company can get back to you to address your problem.
At work, however, the ramifications are different. If you "down rate" your boss or say something critical about the company (even in a constructive way), you may be labelled a “trouble maker," which now reflects poorly on you.
In our prior company (Bersin & Associates) I always valued people who complained a lot, it taught me what I needed to do better. In large companies, however, this kind of behavior is often not appreciated- so people who "speak up" often take career risk.
In some cases the issues are highly sensitive. If people point out process or workplace problems then they are likely to bring up safety issues, sexual harassment, management dysfunction, process inefficiencies, and other problems which could embarrass a manager or create legal risk for the company. So if you know who the complainer is, there may be a natural tendency to retaliate or even suppress their ideas.
The answer is to make the system anonymous, and assure employees that the company absolutely will not know who they are. (This is the approach seasoned HR managers take with any investigation.)
While most employees don’t really trust that surveys are anonymous (after all, they did arrive in my email inbox!), these new tools work hard to assure people that they are (more on that topic below). This means that you, as a business or HR leader, may have to bend over backwards to make sure you never let the system expose anyone's identity and that the tool you use aggregates data in a fair way so people's responses can never be traced back to an individual.
Should you “censor” or “approve” feedback to share? Absolutely yes. Despite best efforts to make these systems constructive and business focused, we’re going to find people who have an axe to grind, may have been treated unfairly, or perhaps are just vindictive by nature. It’s important to manage these systems well so we don’t let insulting, abusive, or confidential information flow through the company.
It's also important to realize that some comments may open legal issues. Some union contracts, for example, prohibit employers from surveying their people - or they require the union to approve. If an employee opens a workforce complaint, some states may put the organization on notice, so HR has to monitor some comments.
My experience with these systems, and I've talked with dozens of companies, is that you must establish the rules (at Netflix the rule is "don't say anything online you wouldn't say in person"), create a listening culture, and take action on what you learn. This will open a deep well of innovation and ideas, giving people a sense of empowerment and ownership.
(It's like the old HP mantra "Management by walking around.")
Removing Friction: The Importance of Simplicity
You may say “we do employee feedback surveys already” or “we have a suggestion process in the company now.” Well that may not be enough.
One of the things we can learn from the ratings economy is that great feedback comes when the process is incredibly easy. If we remove friction from the process (make feedback easy and in the flow of work), the feedback becomes richer.
New feedback apps now let you mouse over a five-star box to give something a rating. Modern pulse surveys appear in your email and let you answer inline without clicking a link or opening a survey. Vendors are starting to attach their ratings to emails or other systems, letting us give feedback in the flow of work. (Think about a feedback box attached to every presentation, email, or document we receive, for example.)
And the questions they ask are simple and short.
A question like “how are you feeling about work?” is enough to give useful trending information. The Japanese app Niko Niko, for example (borrowed from Japanese manufacturing quality programs), lets employees give their boss a “smile, flat, or frown” face at the end of each day. This simple tool gives managers an instant sense of how things are trending, pointing to potential problem areas. Vendors like Trello (an online productivity app) embed this functionality right into the daily flow of work.
Figure: Niko Niko Board Gives Immediate Daily Feedback
A recent article in the Washington Post shows that the TSA is now implementing “real-time feedback” kiosks to let people give instant feedback on their service. The website, http://www.feedback.usa.gov tells it all.
Imagine, for example, a real time "mood monitor" that shows you the daily mood by store, department, or location? A vendor named Celpax sells a system that makes this easy.
Not Surveys, Simple Questions
We don’t need to develop long surveys with long questions. Think about questions like “what was one thing that went well for you this week?” or “what is one thing that wasted your time this week?” These simple questions, asked regularly, help companies and managers gain immediate feedback and see trends.
A national food service company implemented a pulse feedback system and discovered that the drive-thru service window was causing operational glitches in staffing. (People were running back and forth between the drive-up window and the in-store window, rather than having someone dedicated to drive-thru.) A store employee found a fix and within weeks this "suggestion" became standard practice around the country. Think about how many such “fixes” you probably have in your company.
A sales and marketing executive at a fast-growing software company told me he pulses his sales people with one question every week. (The questions range from "How well did the week go?" to "What got in our way this week?" – their vendor provides the bank of questions.) He told me that he can now predict the following week's sales based on the results of last week's pulse survey.
I just finished a meeting with an HR services company and we brainstormed a feedback app that could help leaders make meetings more effective. The app would let you rate each meeting you attend and immediately provide feedback to the meeting organizer on the utility of the session. We could then rate and rank meeting leaders, look at which meetings should be shorter, and… well you can imagine the possibilities. (One particular app, Waggl.it, is designed specifically for this type of usage.)
Do These Tools Work? Yes, When Designed Well.
Wait a minute. Aren’t we already over-surveying people? Aren’t they already “surveyed to death?”
Perhaps, but remember these and similar apps are not surveys, but feedback systems. One version of them is the “pulse survey,” but ultimately they can do much more. They are not long surveys.
The software executive I mentioned above told me that 85%-90% of people respond to his weekly pulse survey -- primarily because they know that management is listening and the survey takes only a few seconds to complete.
Earls Kitchen + Bar, a fast-growing Canadian and now US-based restaurant chain, uses pulse surveys to stay in touch with their staff in every restaurant. As any of you who have worked in food service know, there are hundreds of things that can get in the way of efficient service in a restaurant. Employees in the stores see what's really happening and they often have the best suggestions on what to fix. Mo Jessa, Earls' President, credits his company's financial turnaround with the detailed feedback they receive directly from employees, using a program called "appreciative inquiry".
As Brenda Rigney, VP of People Operations, describes: "We could have redesigned the menu, hired new chefs, or redesigned the facilities... but rather than try to decide what to do, we let our employees tell us." Earls created a "listening campaign," and dozens of good ideas emerged. I won't give away their secrets, but the results have been significant.
People Analytics: A New Source of Actionable Business Data
One of the hottest new areas of HR (and business) is People Analytics: mining employee data to understand ways to improve business performance. Well this data stream may be one of the most valuable you have.
Remember that feedback data is like the canary in the coal mine: it tells you that something is wrong, even if you’re not completely sure what it is.
A Swiss investment bank, which has been studying its employee data for years, told me that the single leading predictor of business unit profitability is “employee engagement.” Imagine what they could do with more current and actionable data.
And Feedback goes well beyond employee happiness, by the way. Once you implement a feedback app you will get help with business performance, turnover issues, theft and abuse, compliance violations, customer service issues, and a whole variety of other operational issues. When sales productivity is low, turnover is high, quality issues arise, or you have theft or compliance problems, the feedback and comments from people should alert you immediately to the problem.
Will you get "noise" and "junk data" in the system? Of course you will, so it's important to set standards. Tell people that personal comments, discriminatory and inflammatory statements, and other types of disparagement are not permitted.
Disruptive to the Engagement Survey Market
This market is new, growing fast, and likely to become a billion dollar market over the next few years. Today companies spend more than $1 billion on annual engagement surveys, and most tell me these are not getting the value they want. While the annual survey has become an institution in many organizations, I believe they will be replaced by these pulse and "always on" systems in the next few years and the incumbent engagement survey vendors will have to adapt.
One of the reasons the traditional engagement survey market is under so much pressure is that the concepts and principles of employee engagement have really changed. As I discuss in It's Time to Rethink the Employee Engagement Issue, annual engagement metrics are not actionable enough for most managers. Being a “Simply Irresistible” organization is an everyday topic, and managers should constantly think about ways they can make work easier and more enjoyable. Employees today are like volunteers, always willing to tell you what we can do to make the business better.
We just need to give them the right opportunity to speak up, then listen and take action.
The Impact on Performance Management: Let Employees Rate their Managers
One of the biggest issues facing HR departments today is the need to redesign the performance management process. Not only are many companies doing away with ratings and simplifying the process as a whole, they are now realizing that the manager-led process has flaws. If managers are here to help and coach their people, shouldn’t the employees also rate the managers?
We know managers are biased. Research shows that 61% of a "rating" is based on the bias of the boss (not actual employee performance), so it makes sense to let employees rate the boss for a more balanced perspective. If a manager is particularly hard on his or her people, this feedback loop helps balance the system.
The performance management market software market is picking up on this. A new breed of performance management systems enables managers to check-in with employees on a regular basis and lets employees rate the manager on a regular basis (displaying aggregate data, so employee identity is protected).
The theme is to reduce the unilateral power of managers, and opening up decisions to a larger group. (Google, for example, does not let managers unilaterally rate employees or decide who to hire because managers act in their own self-interest. They bring these decisions to a higher level to make sure major people decisions focus on the entire organization rather than only a single workgroup.
Vendors like TMBC, Reflektive, Impraise, Engagedly, Workday, SuccessFactors and others are embedding ongoing feedback right into their performance management tools – redefining the multi-billion dollar market for performance and talent management. Companies like BetterWorks make goals fully transparent, so people can comment on and give feedback on their peer's goals and goal attainment.
The focus on the redesign of performance management is to shift from "judgement" to "development," and one of the most important elements is giving people positive, actionable feedback. (This is often accompanied with the elimination of ratings.) I believe structured, developmental feedback tools will become a standard part of performance management software.
The implementation of feedback in performance management is a tremendous area of innovation, by the way, as we shift from tools that automate feedback to tools that facilitate positive feedback.
The Vendor Marketplace Today: Four Emerging Categories
Let’s talk about the marketplace. Innovation is rapid and there are dozens (perhaps hundreds) of startups entering the space. They tend to fall into four broad categories.
1. Next Generation Pulse Survey and Management Feedback Tools
The first category is what I call "next-generation" pulse survey tools.
These companies, like CultureAmp, TinyHR, Glint, Perceptyx, BlackbookHR, Culture IQ, OfficeVibe, Waggl.it, GetHppy, Impraise, ModernSurvey, VirginPulse, TemboStatus, and Thymometrics have developed efficient systems to rapidly survey employees with short, easy to take surveys. Traditional survey vendors like Gallup, IBM (Kenexa), CEB, Sirota, Qualtrics, and others are likely to produce these tools.
The startups are winning over customers because their tools are easy to use, inexpensive, and designed for mobile use. They use a variety of methods to engage people (some are surveys, some are online dashboards), but their #1 focus is making it feedback easy.
The tools are also designed to let managers send quick surveys directly to their team, so for example the VP of sales (per the example above) can easily pulse his or her sales team on what's bugging them each week.
While these companies provide various types of surveys and measurement dashboards to view results, they also have other features that can be useful for performance reviews, management assessments, and other feedback events. For example:
Reflektive lets employees provide feedback to other employees or teams directly in Outlook, so you can provide "feedback" to a person or a team while sending email. Impraise, SmallImprovements, TinyPulse, and StandOut by TMBC are other tools that are moving in this direction. 15Five, Workboard, and Trello sell tools that combines task management with feedback to integrate how you feel with what you do each day. Slack is now offering this as well. Waggl.it is designed to enables pulse feedback after a meeting, presentation, or other business event.
Since the market is so huge, vendors focus in different segments. Some (like Glint, CultureAmp, TinyHR, Blackbook, CultureIQ, Qualtrics) are specifically targeting the enterprise corporate engagement survey space.
Others are focused on "fast multi-purpose feedback" (Thymometrics, Waggl.it, Impraise, TinyHR), and some of their clients use them as complements to an annual survey. Thymometrics, for example, plots and visualizes team "mood" over time.
In time we will see these tools embedded into work management systems. Think about work productivity tools like Slack, Jira, Basecamp, Workboard, Huddle, Trello, and Sharepoint. These are each effective platforms to embed "feedback" as well. While they may not be anonymous, there are many benefits to commenting on a project or a meeting right in the flow of work.
As I talk to corporate HR managers, most are starting to experiment with these tools and many expect to replace their annual engagement survey over time. The new vendors are building standard questions, producing industry benchmarks, and creating enterprise reporting to meet this need.
2. "Open Suggestion Box" and Anonymous Social Network Tools
The second category is a more radical new set of technologies I'd call “category busters” - tools to enable anonymous social networking and ongoing discussions among employees. These are startups trying to build the "YikYak," "Whisper," or the "Secret" of business.
A History of Anonymous Social Apps
Anonymous social networks are not a new idea – in fact the very first social network, MySpace, was anonymous. With the advent of mobile apps, such anonymous networks have re-emerged with a vengeance. Over the last few years history has taught us a lot: these systems are complex and hard to predict, they need to be purposeful in their design, and they need strong privacy protection.
Secret, which published its mobile app in late 2013, rapidly became a phenomenon in Silicon Valley and turned into an “online chat room” which many used to publish rumors, disclose confidential information, troll for sex, and generally bash or complain about anything that bothered them. The tool was hacked a few times and people were never sure if their identity was truly anonymous, creating buzz around the tool's lack of security. Several major business rumors and sexual harassment issues were surfaced on Secret, and as a result the founders shut the system down around the end of 2014.
Whisper, which continues to function, was accused of spying on its users, but later "proved" (through legal and senate hearings) that the company has put in place barriers to prevent anyone from identifying the IP address or phone number of a user. The issue of whether or not posts on Whisper are really confidential continues to be an open topic of debate. (Every mobile device has a unique identifier and can often broadcast an IP address which does identify the owner, so confidentiality can be considered not only a technical issue, but also one of business process.) Whisper uses photos as its paradigm for sharing information, and it is often used by students. It has a lot of personal and relationship-related traffic, but enables its users to downvote or report abuse to help keep the site clean.
YikYak, which is a similar system but focused more on young people and university students, continues to grow, now enabling people to post photos and create group chats on various topics and themes. It enables upvoting/downvoting and also lets individuals "peek" into groups that others have joined. It lets you identify your location so you can see "Yaks" from people close to you (often used for hookups and dating). While the app has been criticized for cyber-bullying, it appears to be quite popular among young people and students.
A work-focused social network, however, is there to help the organization get better – so it’s important that a system enables confidentiality when information is sensitive. We are in new territory here, and many of the vendors in this space are experimenting with ways to keep the conversation positive.
One in particular, Bettercompany.co, focuses particularly on helping users create a "circle of professional friends," albeit anonymously. Another, Getthememo.com, lets users see comments on any company posted and then "follow" companies other than their own. A third, hyphenapp.io, lets you create groups (ie. sales teams, customer service teams) for anonymous conversations. Waggl.it does this as well.
We can learn more about these systems by looking at the history of Facebook. Before Facebook there was MySpace, a social network which let people create anonymous identities and post whatever they wanted. Facebook proved that by requiring people to identify themselves, they could help create a more "friendly" and real environment for communication.
These vendors should be careful. Since it is illegal to slander people, disclose confidential information, or even disparage products and services in a vindictive way, vendors that open up its system for "anonymous feedback" take a risk that they will be asked to disclose their participants (or censor information) if it turns out to be slanderous or confidential.
Will these types of tools take off? I believe they will in time. While no HR manager wants to see flaming vitriol flowing through the company's email system, business leaders want to know how people feel and that's why practices like "management by walking around" are often so important.
Think about the challenges we have with information in companies. When people reach management or senior status in organizations, they start to get filtered information. In fact, the problem of "Groupthink" and "filtered news" is one of the biggest challenges many CEOs and other senior leaders face. While some leaders have "moles" in the organization who share information about what's going on, even that communication channel is inconsistent and unpredictable. On the employee side, people always have reactions to things going on, but they ask themselves "should I say anything?"
The startup founders in this space believe, many passionately, that work will never be "good" until people can be open with their feedback and get managers to listen. Remember that Millennials (more than half the workforce today) grew up with instant feedback so they tend to see these apps as natural parts of their working life.
I talked with Christopher Mims from the Wall Street Journal about this a few months ago and he wrote an article called "Anonymous feedback tools for Bosses." It turns out many of these apps can be used to discuss almost anything: workplace safety issues, workflow inefficiencies, wasted time in meetings, and suggestions about food, benefits, or employee services. Ideally we should be getting a steady stream of this kind of feedback; we just need tools that can help us safely unleash the flow.
By the way, sentiment analysis technology is getting better. A recent article discusses how a consulting firm uses this technology to mine Starbucks’ Glassdoor ratings and found six common employee issues the company faces around the world. Vendors like Kanjoya and Glint are building sentiment analysis right into theirs platforms, and it’s probable that this trend will continue.
Right now there are a variety of tools in this market, including BetterCompany.co, Memo (getthememo.com), Hyphen, Canary, Hinted - and many of those listed in category 1. Many of the pulse survey vendors now offer "open bulletin boards" and open text boxes that enable anonymous feedback, so they cross into this segment. And as sentiment analysis software becomes more and more ubiquitous, we can likely expect “open feedback” to become standard in feedback applications.
3. Culture Assessment and Management Tools
The third category in this market are tools designed specifically to diagnose, monitor, or improve organizational culture.
As I described in Why Culture is the Most Important Topic in Business, Culture is a matching bookend to Engagement. A strong and consistent culture helps people perform well and it also can help organizations decide whom to hire, ways to assess leaders, and what leadership values they want to promote.
Culture is not "one size fits all." Every company can have a different culture and still perform at its best. Culture vendors and culture tools have various models which show how culture varies, and some of the dimensions are simply decisions on how to run a business.
For example, one company may have a "risk-taking culture," encouraging people to try new things, innovate, and often make mistakes in front of customers. This company may have many innovative, groundbreaking products, yet its customers may also know that some of its products are experiments and won't always work the first time.
Another company may be a "fast follower" or "value deliverer," who produces products which are highly tested, very reliable, but perhaps lower in cost and targeted toward customers who are more conservative in their desires. This company would not tolerate risky, early products in the market and as a result, its engineers, marketing, and product management team would be more conservative as well.
I won't try to describe these tools in detail, but I see them as complementary to the tools above, because they provide evaluative models which assess personality traits and organizational behaviors that can help define culture, point out inconsistencies, and illustrate where culture is problematic. Many of these tools also include personality assessments (similar to Myers-Briggs), where individuals and managers can assess themselves, assess their teams, and gain insights and tips on how to better get along or "fit" into the company or team.
Some of the major tools in this category include RoundPegg, Culture IQ, Deloitte's CulturePath, Human Synergistics, Kanjoya, Denison, and Ceridian's new Related Matters, now part of LifeWorks.
Remember, Feedback can be applied to individuals, teams, or the organization as a whole. So tools that can assess individual personalities, as well as the many individual assessment tools, will likely cross into this area.
4. Social Recognition Tools
The fourth category is a big one: tools that help people give others thanks, recognition, and even gifts (or points). While this is a slightly different category (many of these systems are really rewards points and rewards programs), it crosses into this market because whenever you give someone "thanks" you're also providing feedback.
We studied this category a few years ago when we wrote Secrets of Effective Employee Recognition, a major research study that looked at these tools and their potential impact on business performance. What we found is that respondent companies that practiced a "high-recognition" culture have 30% lower voluntary turnover than average, and tend to outperform their peers in a variety of other metrics.
If feedback is the killer app, then "thanks" is the gorilla in the market. When you unleash the ability for people to easily say "thanks" to their peers (and give them points or other rewards), an enormous new network of information often starts to flow. Leaders can suddenly see important people who they may never have noticed, and the culture of helping others can start to grow and improve.
Our research also found that saying "thank you" is an important part of building strong employee engagement. Physiological studies show that thanking someone actually makes people feel better, through the release of Oxytocin, the "trust hormone." (Read this article for more detail.)
How do these fit into this market? These systems help capture feedback, comments, can be tagged with company values, and produce another vast amount of information about how the organization works, who is performing well, and what types of relationships people have. They are typically not anonymous, so they tend to focus more on positive comments than negative – but nevertheless, many companies tell me that these tools unleash enormous amounts of positive energy and can help people understand even better who and why certain behaviors and people are valued highly.
Vendors in this market include Achievers, GloboForce, iAppreciate (by OC Tanner), TemboSocial, Workstars, Kudos Now, and many more.
Is Feedback a Feature, An App, or a Platform?
As an analyst, I always wonder whether a new set of capabilities will become a market, a set of features, or simply a set of practices companies implement internally.
Why, for example, couldn’t I just use an off-the-shelf survey tool to do all this myself?
The answer is becoming clear: this is a complex new area of software and the right features and workflow dynamics are just being developed.
The new vendors in this space are rapidly going down the learning curve on how to design their tools, what questions to ask, and what kinds of feedback loops are going to work the best. So for the next few years I believe companies should look at this as a major new market to explore for HR and employee-related applications.
Consider how innovation often occurs in software. "Slack," one of the fastest-growing software companies in the world of internal communications, is not just another version of a "chat room." It offers a collaboration and messaging technology that aims to radically change the way we work. The company's growth is occurring because it has learned how to simplify its tool, make it easy to use, and build an ecosystem of partners to make it better.
The feedback and culture vendors are doing exactly the same thing. They are inventing new user experiences, creating new workflows, and building new mechanics that facilitate feedback in exciting new ways. As the market grows and features become proven, more of this capability may larger HR systems, but I think it’s more likely these vendors will grow and later be acquired. Companies like Medallia, for example, have built a robust business about customer experience management - we can expect a similar trend to take place in the area of employee feedback.
The larger HR vendors like Workday, SuccessFactors, Oracle, CornerstoneOnDemand, ADP, Saba, and Ceridian are also investing in these tools, but right now the startups are moving faster, and the real "Gorilla" of this space has yet to emerge.
A New Tool for Management has Arrived
Feedback is not just a fad, it’s a major trend.
These new tools have the potential to fill the gap between what managers need to do and what people really want. They give leaders immediate feedback on the programs and actions they take. They unleash new ideas, and open the door to new work practices, and help us engage our people.
But before you jump in, I have a warning. As you embark on this journey, get ready for some unfiltered information, be humble enough to listen, act on suggestions, and thank people for their input, regardless of its nature. And as a recent Wall Street Journal article points out, if you set rules for decency and confidentiality, people will respond.
The market is young, but it's growing fast - I look forward to hearing your feedback on this important and rapidly growing marketplace.
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97cf13053380213ceb3fc245e7911fde | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2016/07/25/workday-acquires-platfora-analytics-race-accelerates/ | Workday Acquires Platfora: Analytics Race Accelerates | Workday Acquires Platfora: Analytics Race Accelerates
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Last week Workday announced the acquisition of Platfora, a fast-growing big data analytics platform company focused on offering analytics solutions for a wide range of business applications. After discussing the application with Workday’s product strategists, it appears this acquisition enables Workday to expand and extend its existing Big Data Analytics offering with broader platform capabilities, a bigger team, and extensions into detailed operational data.
The world of big data analytics has exploded in recent years. Companies are mining business data from retail transactions, customer service interactions, social feeds, and of course financial and HR data to understand and predict buyer behavior, consumer patterns, and of course drivers of people performance. My research on People Analytics shows that this particular domain has doubled in maturity in the last 12 months (read more here) and has now become one of the fastest growing disciplines within HR.
Workday, as one of the leading providers of financial management, planning, and HR software in the cloud, clearly sees analytics and data management as one of its core strengths and value propositions in the future. In fact many clients tell me that the main reason they replace legacy HR and financial software is to provide more useful, predictive analytics about their business. (In addition to making systems easier to use.) Workday clearly sees this, so the Platfora acquisition is one of the company’s ways to “step up” their technology stack and expand into the analysis of non-Workday operational data.
Gallery: Top 10 Business Trends That Will Drive Success In 2016 10 images View gallery
Think about the potential here: imagine you are a retailer and you capture tens of thousands of customer transactions each week. This data base, coupled with data about the external consumer market, data about your employees, and financial data about your store profitability and growth, can form the basis of your company’s planning and predictive analysis about what to sell, where to add stores, and even who to hire and who to promote.
Platfora not only helps Workday perform these analyses, it also gives Workday an open Big Data platform for almost any data source. Insurance companies have policy and claims data, banks have retail and financial transaction data, most companies have CRM and customer behavior data, and of course every business has website traffic data. All these non-Workday data sources are critical to planning and predictive analysis. Workday is laying down the gauntlet to say “we will be experts at bringing this data into your analytics environment too.”
Competitively, this is also an important move. SAP ’s investment in HANA Cloud and Oracle ’s investment in analytics is also focused on capturing operational data. Through the acquisition of Platfora, Workday stays competitive and expands it technology expertise. (Platfora had received $92.5 million in venture capital, so they had built out quite an extensive Big Data platform.)
The analytics marketplace has now achieved tremendous velocity. Today companies today have the staff, understand the vision, and are ready to analyze vast amounts of data for predictive purposes – they just need a platform that is fast enough, extensible enough, and usable enough to give them the analysis they need. This is what Workday is focused on in this acquisition.
This acquisition in no way means that Workday’s existing investment in both embedded analytics and Big Data analytics is at risk. I believe Platfora will be complementary to Workday’s existing products and over time simply make them more capable and bring additional team-mates to the company’s analytics engineering team.
As the acquisition closes and more information becomes available, we will make sure to share more perspectives in the coming quarters.
Other notable moves in the workforce analytics market include Cornerstone's acquisition of Evolv, Ultimate's acquisition of Vestrics, ADP's investment in predictive analytics, IBM's continued investment in Talent Insights (powered by Watson), and continued investment by companies like Mercer , Ceridian, Visier, and dozens of startups in this space. Read "People Analytics Market Growth" for more details.)
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564bea11606aa21a31a300e07fb1639a | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2016/09/21/the-future-of-work-its-already-here-and-not-as-scary-as-you-think/ | The Future Of Work: It's Already Here -- And Not As Scary As You Think | The Future Of Work: It's Already Here -- And Not As Scary As You Think
I recently had the opportunity to speak at the Singularity University Summit in San Francisco on The Future of Work. After months of research on the topic, reading dozens of books and articles on AI, robotics, and economics, I came to a simple conclusion: the future of work is already here. And we all have to deal with it.
The Future Of Work: Why Now?
The phrase "Future of Work," has become a buzz word. (I found 48 million Google hits on the phrase.) There are are suddenly hundreds of conferences, books, and articles on the topic, covering everything from artificial intelligence to robotics to income inequality and contingent labor.
The reason for the interest is simple: we are in an economic cycle where jobs, as we know them, are rapidly changing. In fact, I'd venture to say we are reaching a time when jobs, as we know them, are going away. Here are just a few of the changes:
• Today, driven by tremendous transparency in the job market, we change jobs often. The average baby boomer will be looking for a job 11.7. times in his or her career, according to a BLS study, and Millennials change jobs every two years or less.
• Many of us work on a contingent basis. Nearly 40% of US workers are now contingent and platforms like Uber, TaskRabbit and others have made contingent work easier than ever.
• Technology is automating work an unprecedented rate, as artificial intelligence, sensors, and robotics become mainstream. China is acquiring 160,000 robots just this year. Every week I read an article about potential job loss from driverless cars and trucks, for example.
• The structure of organizations is under attack, changing the nature of work in companies. 92% of CHROs and CEOs tell us they believe their structure must change, and most are looking at ways to flatten the hierarchy, make jobs more dynamic, and further leverage contingent and contract labor.
• Income inequality, a major topic in our political debate, has become an underlying problem. How do policy makers encourage businesses to provide well paying jobs and benefits in the light of automation, contingent work, and restructuring of companies?
The essence of the shift is a simple but big idea: the idea of a "job," with all its protected artifacts like job title, level, and job description, is starting to go away. What is its replacement? People being hired to "do work," get a project done, lead a team, and be ready to move on as the business needs change.
Let me break the Future of Work into three simple parts:
1. First the personal impact: why we work, how work fits into our life, how our careers progress, how we stay current in our skills and capabilities, and how work gives us meaning and purpose.
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2. Second, the organizational impact: what are jobs, what roles do people vs. machines play, how are organizations set up, how do we leverage contingent workers, and how do companies redefine jobs as software and robotics become more powerful.
3. Third, the societal impact: how do we educate and prepare people for work, how do we transition people when jobs change, how do we support policies for minimum wage, immigration, and work standards, and how do we fix economic problems like income inequality and unemployment.
Today all these issues are under debate. Let's discuss them one at a time.
The Personal Side Of The Future of Work
On the personal side, work has become dynamic, disruptive, and somewhat overwhelming. Thanks to the relentless onslaught of messages and technologies we have at work (and at home), two-thirds of organizations tell us their employees are overwhelmed. Today people look at their phones eight billion times a day, we have a shorter attention span than a goldfish (Microsoft research), and we don't take enough vacation. (The average vacation in the U.S. has dropped from 20.3 days to 16.2 days since 1998).
To make it worse, between Twitter, Skype, Snapchat, Whatsapp, Slack, Facebook, Gmail, and Outlook there seem to be a never-ending number of ways people can reach us. The barriers between "work" and "life" have gone away, and we have all become addicted to all the noise (Google finds 85,000 articles citing "phone addiction").
Responding to this challenge, a massive industry of books, videos, classes, and websites has appeared - all focused on ways to better manage our lives. We now have apps and articles to help us relax and focus, tools to help us sleep (many listen to our breathing), wearables which keep track of exercise, and a stream of articles about exercise, nutrition, and super foods. The disciplines of psychology, neuroscience, human performance, and yoga have come together and we are all become "quantified." (One HR manager told me "is a psychology degree the new MBA?")
While all this is hard on us personally, the bigger problem is that productivity is not going up. As the chart below shows, today's wave of technology (since the birth of the iPhone) has provided the lowest productivity improvement of any technology era. (This includes the invention of indoor plumbing, electricity, the automobile, and the mainframe computer). So work has not gotten "easier."
Economists are quite worried about this (Read "The Rise and Fall of American Growth," by Robert Gordon for more), because productivity decline reduces income growth, economic growth, and long term improvements in standard of living.
Why this productivity gap? Many economists believe the way we measure productivity is out of date, but I think its pretty clear. We really aren't more productive, we just feel like we are. We live in a world where constant messaging distracts us, we are always looking for ways to share what we've done, and we all suffer from FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) when a new message arrives. The companies selling these tools make money on "user engagement," so they've built game mechanics which are quite advanced. Consider the power of the red dot which tells you how many messages you have: can you really stop yourself from clicking on it?
The Change In Our Careers
Not only is work more dynamic and often overwhelming, the way we manage careers has changed. As I write about in "Hacking the Career: What Should Organizations Do?" we have to accept the fact that our careers no longer go "up" and we can't depend on one company to take care of us for life.
A simple way to understand the shift is to think about the image created by Dick Bowles, author of the book "The Three Boxes of Life". Today, unlike the past, we don't "study," then "work," and then "retire." We learn, work, and enjoy leisure throughout our lives, and hopefully this process goes on until our later years.
The Change In Our Organizations
On the organizational side, many things are happening. First, jobs are quickly changing, as "augmented intelligence" (the new definition of AI) takes over more mundane tasks.
We are all familiar with the Siri or Cortana which understands our voice. Well the same type of software is now able to interpret photos, sensor information, and data from computers.
Insurance companies now have software that can view a picture of your dented car, identify the make and model, and compute the amount of the claim. Software can read X-rays almost twice as well as seasoned radiologists, and voice recognition can type 300% faster than you can.
Technologies like natural language processing, reasoning, and self-learning are becoming mature. Products like Amazon Echo, Siri from Apple Inc., Cortana from Microsoft, Watson from IBM, and Viv from Viv Labs can understand your commands, perform tasks, and learn.
Think about what happens in a call center. When you call to change a reservation or change an order the agent has to look you up, find your account, and locate your transaction. Much of this can now be done through voice recognition and AI. And if the agent has to type into a terminal, the typing can be automated by software called RPA (Robotic Process Automation), which monitors keystrokes and develops robotic software automatically.
One of the reasons this market is accelerating is the explosive role of sensors, which have gotten cheaper than ever (sensors that see better than our eyes now cost less than $2,000). The smart phone we carry often has 6 embedded sensors (temperature, GPS, accelerometer, humidity, ambient sound, magnetometer, and more). These sensors enable mobile devices to do things we never thought computers could do, and Pokemon Go is just the beginning. Soon we will devices that listen to our voice, understand when we are under stress, monitor our heart beat, and give us personal recommendations for better meetings, work conditions, and customer interactions. The opportunity for work augmentation, work improvement, and productivity improvements is massive.
One of the examples I talked about in the speech is the emergence of "farm tech," drones, artificial intelligence and sensors applied to farming. Machines from companies like John Deere use cameras and sensors to precisely plow fields, plant seedlings in the right place, and place just enough water to keep each plant moist. They can "see" weeds to pick them, add just enough fertilizer for each plant, and look at plant color to decide when it should be harvested. This technology is available today, and its improving farm productivity already.
The Redesign Of Organizations
The second issue we face is the redesign of organizations themselves. Industrial organizations of today were designed in a world where we were the "means of production," and our "jobs" were essentially designed by HR and business executives. We read the "job description," "applied for a job," and were "assessed for fit." The manager or HR department looked at our skills and abilities and tried to decide if we could fit into the organization and do that job well.
The reason organizations exist was to harness this highly efficient, industrial model - where we, as workers, could be highly productive doing repetitive tasks, and the company gained through economies of scale.
Today this economic model is under attack. Our research shows that 92% of companies believe their organizational design is not working, yet only 14% know how to fix it. The answer, as we've discovered, is to empower people in small teams, link these teams together, and build an organizational culture that keeps people aligned and lets people innovate, deliver, and serve customers on the front line. While we are in the early stages of this massive revolution, one of the biggest impacts it has is on the nature of work itself. GE, Cisco, Deloitte, and of course disruptive companies like AirBnB, Uber, and many others are moving in this direction.
Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini believe that the "hollowing out of middle management" can save $3 trillion per year in the US alone. While I can't vouch for that number, it's clear that organizational structure is changing, and technology is reducing the need for traditional manager roles.
What this means to us as individuals is that our "position" and "job title" just isn't as important any more. What matters is "what you know how to do" and your personal and professional reputation. This means we all must learn how to continuously reskill ourselves, market and position our skills and experience, and get comfortable taking new jobs and new roles which do not always go "up."
Are Jobs Going Away?
The most common headline about the future of work is that jobs are going away. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Oxford University wrote a well publicized report that 47% of jobs will "disappear" in the next 20 years. Well I certainly hope so! I would love the job of toll taker, street sweeper, garbage man, and even bus driver to go away. This is not a bad thing: research shows that for every job that "goes away" another one or two is created ("The Rise and Fall of Nations," cited previously). And I'm not talking about the small number of jobs needed to program computers (even software engineers will be automated soon), every example we've seen shows that when "automation" comes, new jobs are created.
As David Autor, a well known MIT professor states: "The employment-to-population ratio rose during the 20th century. Our own research shows that for the last 140 years, technology has been a “great job-creating machine." Ron Hancock, General Manager of Deloitte UK states, “ We should automate work and humanize jobs. Let’s give the mundane to the machines and the purpose back to people.” (Deloitte research "Essential Skills for Working in the Machine Age")
Let me cite two examples. In the 1980's there was a wave of automation in the banking industry, starting with the ATM machine. At that time articles predicted the end of the bank branch, the end of the branch teller, and the automation and elimination of jobs in financial services. In fact the opposite has occurred. Today, with more than 1 million ATM's around the world, there are almost four times as many bank branches and more than 10% more tellers than in the 1980s. Automation enabled the market for financial transactions to greatly expand. Tellers today do higher level things (sell you stuff and help you with complex transactions). Most of us go to the ATM and then walk into the bank.
Here's a second example. In 1981 when the first spreadsheet was invented (originally Multiplan, which led to Lotus 1-2-3 and eventually Excel), there was a worry on Wall Street that financial analysts, most of whom were creating paper-based spreadsheets for financial analysis, would go out of business. Did they? Of course not, quite the opposite: today there are more financial analysts than ever (we all seem to do it) and the best ones are experts at using tools like Excel, creating a new industry of ever-more powerful analysts.
As one of my partners at Deloitte puts it, are you afraid that your vacuum cleaner is going to take your job? I actually hope my vacuum cleaner gets a lot smarter (and also a lot quieter).
So the answer to this question is NO. Jobs are NOT going away, they're just changing.
One final point on this topic. Many human skills are essential. Deloitte UK research, which looked at hundreds of job profiles and mapped them against the Oxford study, identified 25 critical "human skills" that are expected to become ever-more important as technology evolves. These are skills which are "essentially human," and they provide a guideline for the redesign of jobs and careers in the future.
As you can see from the list, skills like empathy, listening, communication, and prioritization are essentially human. So the future of work is not about jobs going away, its a story about each and of us redesigning what we do to better leverage tools.
What Happens To People And Our Careers?
But how do we and organizations adapt? Organizations, individuals, and society must change.
On a personal level, we each have to learn new tools. In the 1981 when PC's came along the "steno pool" typists were at risk. These people learned to use computers and became secretaries, administrative assistants, and often writers.
I have been in the job market since 1978, a time when there was no voicemail, no computers, and no email. Since then I've learned how to use all the modern tools of the information age, and I'm just about as facile as my children with applications like Snapchat and Instagram. Those of us who are afraid or intimidated by technology will fall behind, so we all have to force ourselves to learn. And if you're an HR professional or business leader, you have to learn about technology too - because it radically impacts the way you organize work.
At an organizational level, the key to success is what we now call design thinking. Organizations need to understand what technology can do and then use it to enhance the customer and employee experience. Let me give you a few examples:
• Starbucks or Peets could chose to install robot coffee machines in its stores. They don't, of course, because the customer experience is focused on a personal conversation with a barista, the sound and smell of coffee being made, and a cup with your name hand-written on it. These companies have continuously made barista jobs better, steadily increasing wages and benefits, improving the customer experience.
• Wegman's, one of the best places to work in the country, coaches employees on putting down their phones so they can talk directly with customers. They have "no-phone" meetings and have built a culture around using technology for back-office tasks but not interrupting the customer experience.
Every company has the opportunity to rethink its own customer and employee experience, and apply technology to make it better. In some cases this means changing jobs, but in most cases it means making jobs "better," reducing cost and mundane tasks, and adding more value to customer interactions.
One of the biggest challenges in organizations is creating a more dynamic career model. (Read "Hacking the Career" for more details.) Companies are now heavily focused on internal talent mobility, self-directed learning, and new software tools to help people find the next job. Organizations like Cisco, Yum Brands, Wegman's, and WL Gore, for example, have redefined their management principles to focus on actively enabling people to move from job to job, role to role, faster than ever.
It turns out, by the way, that your ability to provide a modern and dynamic career environment is one of the top drivers of employment brand. Our research members recently awarded Marriott a Bersin by Deloitte WhatWorks award for their leading program to attract young people into dynamic, facilitated management careers.
Education And Public Policy Must Keep Up
One of the most vocal topics that came up in our session (we had over 600 people there) was a noisy debate about the role of education. Many believe educational institutions have not kept up with the steady demand for skills. I believe education still plays a vital role in the development of basic skills (thinking, writing, analyzing, math, science) and in their place an industry of new education companies (Pluralsight, General Assembly, EdX, Cousera, and hundreds of others) to help us rapidly learn new technical skills for work.
Public policy plays a large role. Clearly there is an ongoing debate about income inequality and the impact of contingent work platforms. While contingent work is now easier to find, most of these jobs do not pay benefits, they have no vacation policy, there is no overtime, and there are almost no work-related expense reimbursements. Many policy makers are arguing for self-funded "security accounts" and a new third class of worker to provide fair wages and benefits for the growing contingent workforce.
Others now argue for "shared security accounts" so people can invest in their own personal careers as they move from job to job, role to role, company to company. There is even a debate among economists about the need for a "guaranteed basic income" as an incentive to revitalize innovation and career reinvention. These ideas are all worth considering, given the need to accelerate personal reinvention and continuous reskilling.
Our Personal Career Strategies Must Adapt
I recently had the opportunity to spend some time with Gary Bolles, who's father wrote "What Color is Your Parachute," one of the most well-read books on finding a job. Gary and I agreed that the most important skill to build in today's "future of work" is what you may call "personal reinvention" - the ability to let go of who you are today and recreate yourself as jobs around you change.
This is an urgent topic. The Bureau of Labor Statistics believes Americans will have 12-14 careers in their lifetime, so we have to get comfortable letting go of the idea that "you are what you do." If you define self-worth and your personal identity by a title on your business card, you're likely to be disappointed.
I've had a 38+ year career now and have worked in technical support, sales, account management, marketing, product management, project management, business development, engineering, and executive leadership. I've worked in five different industries and been everything from a "trainee" to a CEO and Founder along the way. I no longer define myself by my title, I simply introduce myself by telling people "what I do."
I am at an age where some of my friends are nearing "retirement." One of them, an individual who traveled the world as a business executive, said to me: "remember when you were young there was that older guy who sat in a cubicle and just helped other people do their jobs? That's me now." He still loves work, he contributes in an important way, and he helps other young high performers succeed.
There is much more to this story, but let me summarize with a simple thought. The "Future of Work" is here right now. Your job is being changed before your eyes, and if you don't sit up straight and just look around, you may miss the changes taking place.
Take some time to learn a new tool or two, go to an industry conference in your field, and spend time networking with others in your domain. We all have to deal with the future of work, and it's not going to be as scary as you think.
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dca5977a022f97dcc93ea9e891c702d9 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2017/11/02/hr-technology-for-2018-ten-disruptions-ahead/ | HR Technology For 2018: Ten Disruptions Ahead | HR Technology For 2018: Ten Disruptions Ahead
I've been an analyst following the HR Tech market for almost 20 years now, and this year things are changing faster than ever. In the report we just published, "HR Technology Disruptions for 2018," I describe the details. In this article I'll summarize the ten big changes going on.
1. A Massive Shift From "Automation" To "Productivity."
For many years the focus on HR technology was to automate and integrate HR practices. This meant online payroll, record-keeping, learning management, resume capture, interview and hiring, assessment, performance appraisals, compensation, management, resume capture, interview and hiring, assessment, performance appraisals, compensation, etc.
HR Technology Disruptions for 2018 Deloitte
Well all that's important, but it's just "business as usual" now. A wide range of cloud-based HRMS and payroll vendors are now in the market, and you get very little credit for "automating" HR. (You do get penalized if you don't of course). Our new High-Impact HR (HIHR) research shows that about 45% of companies are still focused on basic process automation, so I understand if this is still top on your list.
But beyond automation, as the HIHR article discusses, the big topic in business today is productivity. We are now working on agile, team-centric organizations, and we are overwhelmed with too much to do. Burnout, focus, and employee engagement are all issues, and we are now dealing with email, messaging from many different systems, and a plethora of communication tools that overwhelm most of us. Can we build HR software that really improves productivity and helps teams work better together? That's the next challenge.
2. Acceleration Of HRMS And HCM Cloud Solutions, But Not The Center Of Everything
In the last five years, cloud-based HR has become the rage. I could list more than two dozen highly successful vendors that offer HRMS, payroll, and many talent management services in the cloud. And in most cases they are offering financials and other ERP solutions as well. So the question for most companies is no longer "if" you go to the cloud, but rather "when" and "how."
Well it's harder than it looks. Despite these rapidly maturing solutions, only about 40% of companies today use cloud HCM solutions, and my experience with large companies is that the migration often takes 2-3 years or longer. (There is a lot of customized HR software out there.) So we are going to be "moving to the cloud" for a while yet, and the decision of which vendor to select looms large. In fact most companies ponder their vendor decision for months (or years), and feel the decision will have radical impact on their entire employee population.
Well despite strong marketing from the HCM companies, I believe this worry is misplaced. While the cloud HR and payroll system is a critical system for any business, it can be replaced. And the more important technology you buy (as I discuss in trend 1) is the talent and team management software. So your architecture looks more like a "set of services" all focused on making employees' lives easier... not a single cloud vendor.
This topic will be the subject of another article, but let me just tease you with the slide below. This is what HCM architectures of today really look like. The most critical part might be that green layer in the middle, which we can probably call the "employee services" layer (which is looking more and more like chatbots every day).
Read more about this in the report, and stay tuned for more on this topic. My belief is that a new "breed" of HCM software is emerging, and as I describe above, I believe it looks more like "team management" and less like "talent management" every day.
3. Continuous Performance Management Is Here: And You Should Get With It
I wont belabor this topic (read "The Myth of the Bell Curve" for more), but the answer is now clear: continuous performance management is possible, it works, and it can transform your company. We are not talking about doing away with ratings, rather we are talking about building a new, ongoing process for goal setting, coaching, evaluation, and feedback.
The report discusses all the details (including vendors) but let me leave you with one big finding: despite the tremendous success of the cloud HCM vendors in the market, most do not have a total solution for this problem. So you are going to be buying new products to address this issue, and these new "team-centric" tools are likely to become the future leaders in the HCM market of the future.
4. Feedback, Engagement, And Analytics Tools Reign
Only a few years ago the engagement survey market was a robust but sleeply place. Today it has become a dynamic world of real-time survey systems, sentiment analysis software, organizational network analysis (ONA) tools, and products that actually automatically ask your peers for feedback to give you real-time coaching.
And open feedback tools are growing again, giving employees many new places to comment on the workplace. A new area of growth is the explosion of systems to offer pay transparency and are now crowdsourcing and providing benchmarking tools to help you "find your worth" (a phrase Glassdoor coined) through open feedback and benchmarking.
As I wrote about a few years ago in the article "Feedback is the Killer App," I believe this explosion of transparency has been very healthy for business, and it has spawned a new set of pulse surveys, AI-based analysis and recommendation systems, and culture assessments throughout the marketplace. You can get this technology from startups, ERP vendors, talent management systems, and embedded in the new performance management systems. I think companies have to think about this as an overall architecture, but this is still a new world.
5. Reinvention Of Corporate Learning Is Here
I've written about this extensively (read The 10 Disruptive Changes in Learning) but the simple message is this: a new breed of corporate learning tools has finally arrived, and companies are snapping them up quickly.
These include the "experience platforms," a new breed of "micro-learning platforms," modernized LMS systems, and new AI-based systems to recommend learning, find learning, and deliver learning. Virtual Reality-based learning is now alive and well, and I expect to see smarter and smarter technologies to help us find "just what we need" along the lines of performance support. And you can now buy systems that let employees publish and share content without any major effort on your part.
6. The Recruiting Market Is Thriving With Innovation
Recruitment is the largest marketplace in HR. Companies spend billions each year on recruiting and it has become an escalating war for employment brand, candidates, candidate experience, and strategic sourcing. High volume recruitment (hospitality, services, healthcare, retail) is being automated by chatbots and other new tools; skilled job recruitment is being revolutionized by open sourcing tools, more automated applicant tracking systems (now called recruitment management systems), and better assessments. And video assessment and culture assessment tools have matured so far that everyone can use them.
I find this part of HR technology the most dynamic and innovative, primarily because every major company has to buy a whole tapestry of tools to compete. I liken the recruitment technology market to the problem builders face in construction. You need an entire toolset of world-class machines to do the job, and each one has its own learning curve to use well. Recruiters are like the finished carpenters of the trade: they become better and better over time, and suddenly you find out your competition is stealing your people and you don't know what hit you.
The market has gotten hotter than ever, with unemployment rate near record lows. We are back into the "war for talent" (a 15 year old phrase) and this time "the talent is leading the charge." In other words, all the new technologies are making recruiters smarter about candidates, just as candidates are getting smarter about your companies.
Remember also that the old fashioned "job description" is really going the way of the dinosaur. More and more jobs are "hybrid" and rapidly changing, so the new world of tools has to help us find people with the right capabilities and learning skills, not just technical or cognitive abilities. And diversity is now a core part of recruiting, with new technology to help remove bias from job descriptions and reduce bias in interviewing (even VR can help with this). Lots to read about here.
7. The Wellbeing Market Is Exploding
I probably don't need to mention that HR technology, content, and tools for wellbeing may likely be the next "big thing" in business. Not only do we need tools to improve productivity and reduce cognitive overload, but we also need "nudges" and data to help us exercise, stay mindful, and learn how to sleep and eat better. In the report I tried to describe some of the most innovative new solutions in the market. My experience with these vendors is that most of them are driving tremendous value for their customers, and the clients I talk with are seeing rapid adoption of these tools (especially among younger workers) and great improvements in engagement, health, and mental wellbeing.
At Deloitte, following the path of most companies, the wellbeing initiative moved from a focus on "health" to a focus on "reducing burnout" to a new focus on "human performance." This is the journey most HR departments are going through and the vendor market is moving fast.
We have been doing research on "energy at work" and I think this concept may best encompass the new world of "engagement, productivity, and wellbeing" in one simple concept. These new tools can help us measure energy, figure out why and where energy is low, and give us individual nudges and tips on how to improve our energy. Lots to read about on that topic.
8. People Analytics Matures And Grows
We will soon launch our new maturity model on People Analytics and what you'll see is a tremendous shift from companies "playing with models" to companies "seriously investing in infrastructure" to bring all their people data together. As I've discussed many times, employee-related data (and all the aspects it includes) is just as important or more important than customer data, because it tells you the secrets of how to manage your business better.
The marketplace is now rich with embedded solutions (nearly every HCM vendor has embedded analytics, many with prediction engines), and all the new vendors are starting to apply AI to their offerings. While this market has been very long in coming, the growth of cloud platforms is now making it explode, and it's easier than ever to build a manager-level dashboard that helps your teams understand what they can do to make the work experience better.
At the corporate level, the ONA software market is now growing (organizational network analytics) so a new world of "relationship analytics" is taking hold. We can now look at core HRMS data (turnover, tenure, performance rating), relationship data (who you know, who you spend time with, what teams you are part of), wellbeing data (your activity, location, energy, wellbeing), and your sentiment data (feedback, mood, and sense of belonging). All this data is falling into the laps of HR departments and they are now staring to grapple with the issues of ethics, privacy, and becoming more transparent about what analytics they are doing.
There is a fundamental shift away from "PhD People Analytics Projects" to more business-oriented programs that help study sales performance, team performance, and other business critical issues. And as I discuss in the report, companies at Level 4 in our new model are delivering real-time dashboards to managers to make this all actionable. I personally see People Analytics as the lynchpin of success for HR in the next few years, as all these other technologies throw off data at an ever-increasing rate.
9. Intelligent Self-Service Tools
If you're a software person like me, you have to ask the question: how do we bring all this "stuff" together into a seamless employee experience to make work better? Do we build apps? Do we upgrade our employee portal? Do we hope AI and conversational systems will sit on top of everything? It's quite a complicated issue.
In today's HR technology environment perhaps the most important new market is the fast-growing need for self-service, employee experience platforms. As I describe in the report, these are fast-changing systems that bring case management, document management, employee communications, and help-desk interactions into one integrated architecture. They sit between employee apps and back end applications, and they serve as the lifeblood of your employee service centers (which are going to be more automated every day).
And AI is coming fast. We had Diane Gherson the CHRO of IBM come to our research conference this Spring and she showed off a cognitive manager coach, a cognitive career coach, and a cognitive recruitment coach. Most of these tools are now becoming products to buy, and I've seen and talked with vendors that offer smart chatbots (focused on a single domain), intelligent agents, and amazingly fun games that make training, expense reporting, time tracking, and almost every other HR function easy. One vendor showed off a voice application which lets you query the system for vacation balance, performance tips, and even compliance training.
I think this is a huge new market, and I"m not even sure what to call it yet.
10. Innovation Within HR Itself
The tenth disruption I've written about is the incredibly rapid growth in innovation projects within HR teams. We, as HR professionals, are now becoming the disruptors. It used to be we waited for tech companies to invent things - then we figured out how to use them and bought them. Now HR departments are experimenting with new performance management models, new learning strategies, new ways to reduce bias, and new techniques to recruit and coach people. Then they go into the market and see if vendors are available. This shift to me is a disruption itself - forcing the HR technology community to move even faster than ever.
I encourage you to read the whole report, it was quite an effort to get it finished. This is a rapidly changing market and one in hypergrowth mode this year. I hope our research helps you make some sense of all these changes and I look forward to your feedback.
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b3876089c6316a28eb597499b1ef7b7c | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2017/12/16/people-analytics-here-with-a-vengeance/ | People Analytics: Here With A Vengeance | People Analytics: Here With A Vengeance
People Analytics Bersin
I’ve been studying People Analytics for almost 20 years now and this world has really changed. In this article I’d like to give you some insights on the explosive growth, and explain some of the new research we just published.
1. People Analytics has grown up – it is now an established discipline in business.
For years the discipline of HR analytics, training analytics, or people analytics was considered a nichy, backwater part of Human Resources. You may have had an I/O Psychologist analyzing engagement data, or a data analyst looking at the impact of various training programs, or you analyzed job advertising to figure out which ads produced better candidates.
Each of these projects was typically done by a technical individual, often a person doing it in their spare time, and there was a small budget for analysis tools (spreadsheets were always the most popular) or a few specialized tools that helped collect data in that domain of HR.
The projects were often used as a way to “cost-justify HR investments” so we looked at the ROI of various training programs, variations in employee engagement and where managers needed to focus on employees, or perhaps how pay was unevenly distributed, the distribution of performance ratings, or other topics which helped the company improve its various HR programs.
I met with dozens of groups like this over the years and always did fantastic work – but the two issues they typically raised were (A) we don’t have enough budget to expand this work into an enterprise-wide program, and (B) the quality of our data is poor and we don’t have the money, infrastructure, or IT support to build a complete data warehouse (now called a “data lake”).
Today, I’m happy to say, all this has changed. With the increased focus on measuring diversity, gender pay equity, skills gaps, labor utilization, retention rates, real-time feedback, and even organizational network analysis, CEOs and CHROs now understand that people analytics is a vital part of running a high performing company.
Witness the following data from our High-Impact People Analytics study: this year 69% of companies are integrating data to build a People Analytics database . In prior years this was always about 10-15% of the organizations we surveyed – this huge change in investment is a sign that this discipline has grown up.
I recently completed a trip to Asia and spent a few hours with the People Analytics team at a large financial institution. I was exhilarated to find myself surrounded by 15 senior HR and technical professionals, an HR VP and senior Director, and a set of business partners dedicated to helping business unit leaders take advantage of the people-related data in their organizations. This kind of effort is now happening in large companies everywhere.
2. The problems of data quality, integration, and integrity are being addressed.
In all the research we’ve done on this topic (including the study we just published), the problem of data quality, consistent definitions, and data integrity (ie. We don’t have multiple copies of the same data in different forms) have been major obstacles. In the 2017 Deloitte Human Capital Trends we found that 39% of business people believe their company has “very good” or “good” quality data for people-related decision-making and 31% understand what “best-in-class” people analytics looks like. This is an astoundingly high number and I believe the 2018 data will show even more progress.
People Analytics Maturity Grows Bersin by Deloitte
(Our research also found that level 4 companies are twice as likely to have a data council responsible for data governance – a critical success factor in keeping people analytics data reliable and useful over time.)
In our new High-Impact People Analytics maturity model we found that 90% of the companies at level 4 believe they have accurate people-related data, 95% believe they have strong practices for data privacy and security, and 75% believe they have consistent data definitions. While this is still a small number of companies, you can see that “world-class” is now easy to define.
There are two reasons this has happened. First, the need for high-quality data is urgent, as CEOs and CHROs are being asked to report on pay equity, diversity, and skills gaps by the board. Second, there’s a new generation of integrated cloud HCM systems (approximately 40% of companies now have a cloud-based HCM system[1]) that require a company to implement a more consistent system of record.
I am not saying this effort is easy. According to the latest Sierra-Cedar survey on HR systems, the average company now has more than 7 “systems of record” for people related data. (Payroll, learning, recruiting, performance, engagement, wellbeing, and others.) But what has gotten easier is integrating this data – a wide set of new tools is now available to help integrate data in an easier way than ever before, and most big companies now have Hadoop clusters and data lakes they can set up to bring all this data together.
3. Companies are greatly expanding the type, nature, and level of data to analyze.
We now live in a world where employee-related data is everywhere, and it is expanding day by day. Most companies have lots of data about pay, performance, learning, job candidates, recruitment, talent mobility, and organizational compliance.
But they now also have near real-time data about employee engagement (coming from pulse surveys or continuous performance management tools), employee recognition (from social recognition systems), employee communications and teams (through organizational network analysis and email metadata analysis systems), travel and location (through time and expense, employee badge readers, or phone location data), employee wellbeing (through wellbeing applications and voluntary data shared about exercise and fitness), and even trust and employee sentiment (through “mood analysis” of survey responses and emails).
Enterprise Feedback Architecture Bersin by Deloitte
Our research shows that advanced companies now use 7 different “methods” for capturing data, including looking at internal and external social media, ERP systems, surveys, and analyzing information in business communication tools. Many of the new email systems being offered now enable “organizational network analysis” (ONA) to look at email metadata, so this data is easier and easier to collect.
I know it sounds a little creepy, but several vendors now sell software that reads email and identifies the “mood” or “changes in mood” in team or organizational communication. One of them showed me data that can spot “stress” in the organization and has proven that its algorithms can pinpoint areas of potential fraud or client projects that are going poorly. We now have access to many tools that measure stress in our voice: I would not be surprised to see systems in the workforce in 2018 that listen to meetings and identify areas of stress. (Note that Amazon just announced Alexa for Business[2] – one could easily build a “skill” that listens to meetings and applies off the shelf AI algorithms to analyze the conversations.)
One of our clients told me about a project they did to analyze the performance of their engineering teams. They asked a set of engineers to wear smart badges and join a project to understand “what makes engineers happy and productive at work.” After several months of analysis they found that the “happiest” engineers were the ones who moved around the most – they had more physical activity, more relationships, and spent more time meeting with others. This was important data used to reorganize the facilities, change the way meetings were handled, and improve management practices to encourage engineers to spend more time with their peers. Almost every company now has the ability to do this type of analysis.
In our newest research we highlight how JetBlue uses many sources of data to understand attrition patterns, drivers of engagement, and causes of flight delays and low productivity. They integrate feedback data, crew and customer complaints, HRIS data, training data, and data about employee flight activity into an integrated system that gives the company a total picture of employee satisfaction, engagement, and customer service. Intuit is doing the same.[5]
4. Data and analytics literacy has become an imperative for HR professionals.
I remember a meeting with a CHRO several years ago where he told me “I’m tired of hiring HR professionals that don’t know the difference between a median and a mean. I’m thinking of asking all my HR teams to take a course in statistics.”
Well that dream is starting to become a reality. Our new research shows that one of the biggest factors that predicts success in People Analytics is not just the skills of the analytics team – it’s the skill set of the HR business partners, analysts, and staff. In fact we found that level 4 companies have a sharply higher set of skills among their general HR population than those at lower levels of maturity – and I’d venture to say that this is a new “bar” they have raised for their teams. (Level 4 companies report that 63% of their HR professionals have strong analytics literacy, vs 20% in Level 1 companies.)
So HR professionals out there: it's time to become data geeks!
The reason for this is simple. In the world of People Analytics today, the power of the analysis is not always the line manager looking at a dashboard to figure out why someone is likely to leave their group (they don’t have the time or inclination to do this). Rather it’s the HR business partner, HR VP, or HR consultant who comes to the senior leader and shows him or her data which points out that their team has bias, poor work practices, weak skills, failing culture, or other problems that can be proven with data.
Most business people have learned that data is key to their success: they will not listen to an HR professional waving their hands about how bad the “culture” may be or how “biased” or “unfair” the organization has become. They want data to prove what is wrong and they want data-driven recommendations for improvement. If the HR professional cannot make that case, show the data in a clear and understandable way, and defend their analysis, the line leader simply will not listen.
I know that in my case as a business leader I always ask people to give me a data-driven explanation for why they recommend a course of action. If they can’t show me the data I always wonder where they came up with the advice. This has now become the new world of HR: if you can’t put data behind your work, business leaders just will not pay attention.
So the problem is not just “having the data” but “knowing how to use it” and understanding how to explain it, visualize it, and put it into action in front of a business leader. And the business leader may have an MBA or background in statistics and is very likely to ask you “where did this data come from” and “how did you come to that conclusion.”
HR teams are not there yet – I still hear continuously that HR business partners are not analytic enough. But if there’s one thing you should think about in 2018, it’s “energizing your HR organization” with a good set of courses, programs, and exercises in statistics, data analysis, and the effective communication of data-driven recommendations.
In our research we detail the program Chevron developed to build global HR skills in analytics: it has been extremely effective in their organization, and serves as an example of how important it is to take data literacy seriously within the HR function.
5. AI and Machine Learning have arrived – and People Analytics teams are using these algorithms to partner with the business
The final change I’d like to point out is the fact that advanced statistics, neural networks, and other forms of machine learning have arrived. LinkedIn just published a study[3] that shows skills in “machine learning” are now the hottest in the marketplace, and a new study[4] by a team of AI leaders shows that courses in AI are exploding in popularity. These professionals are now in the workforce and they are itching to look at interesting data problems in business.
AI Growth AI Growth
(By the way, if you dig into machine learning, you find that it's essentially a lot of math. People Analytics teams are going to be able to develop or use these algorithms from public domain APIs, so this technology is available to any company.) I've now talked with HR departments who are looking at attrition patterns, prediction models for performance and retention, models for employee absence and grievances, and analysis of many other forms of employee productivity – all based on the People Analytics data available within their organizations. These companies are starting to correlate this data against data available from external social networks and can now learn things about their companies they never before thought possible.
One vendor, for example, now has a tool that reads comments from bi-annual engagement surveys and automatically recommends direct behavioral changes to managers to help improve the engagement and productivity of his or her team. Another company has built a machine-learning algorithm that identifies the behavior of their best sales people to help understand how to train others to perform at a higher rate. Many professional services firms are looking at communication patterns and travel schedules for the highest performing consultants to figure out what others can learn.
We used to think the secret to productivity at work was “skills.” Now, through the use of machine learning, we can understand that the secret is also “behaviors,” “habits,” and “patterns” that highly successful people adopt. Many of these are unconscious by the experts, but can be analyzed and understood by software.
Our research shows that the highest-performing people analytics teams are now partnering directly with the business, serving as internal consultants, and bringing their analytics expertise to bear to focus on productivity, performance, safety, and direct facing work related problems.
As the head of analytics at a large technology firm put it:
“I am not in the curiosity business. We need to know the relevance to the business before we spend time and energy to work on a problem.”
This is the new mantra we see taking hold.
People Analytics Maturity Bersin by Deloitte
Let me summarize by saying this has been quite a journey. I’ve been studying this domain for almost 20 years now and the domain of people analytics has reached the C-Suite. For those of you still wondering how to proceed, I suggest 2018 should be your year to consider investing in these technologies. I look forward to hearing your stories and would love to help any organization understand how to take advantage of this critical new business imperative.This has been a long journey, and it continues.
Josh is a published author on Forbes, a LinkedIn Influencer, and has appeared on Bloomberg, NPR, and the Wall Street Journal, and speaks at industry conferences and to corporate HR departments around the world.
You can contact Josh on twitter at @josh_bersin and follow him at http://www.linkedin.com/in/bersin . Josh's personal blog is at www.joshbersin.com .
As used in this document, “Deloitte” means Deloitte Consulting LLP, a subsidiary of Deloitte LLP. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of our legal structure. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting.
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7ac006bd3312097c58e5be7a28d485e4 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2018/10/31/why-arent-wages-keeping-up-its-not-the-economy-its-management/?sh=71413fad397e | Why Aren't Wages Keeping Up? It's Not The Economy, It's Management | Why Aren't Wages Keeping Up? It's Not The Economy, It's Management
Wages not keeping up McDonald's
In the decade since the 2008 recession we’ve had an enormous runup in the stock market, accelerating growth in GDP, and a steady increase in job growth. Yet despite these positive economic trends, wages are not keeping up.
Yes, they ticked up in the most recent jobs report, but they're still lagging in a significant way.
In this article, I’d like to explain why this may not a problem of economics, but rather an issue of management – and one which we can address by changing the nature of the discussion.
Point 1: Wages Are Not Keeping up.
Let’s just discuss the issues of wages: they are not keeping up with inflation. Consider the data below. While the GDP has risen (after inflation), real incomes have barely budged.
Wages not keeping up with inflation. NY Times
In fact, if we look at U.S. wages over the longer term, wages after inflation have barely budged over the last 44 years.
It’s frightening to consider, but my parents, who were a young couple in the 1960s, could buy a house for less than 25% of their take-home pay. They owned two cars and put my brother and me through college on a middle-income salary. (My father was a scientist with a mid-level job.) That dream is elusive today.
As Heather Boushey, an economist with The Washington Center for Equitable Growth puts it,
The economy is growing. Why aren’t people feeling it?” Boushey says. “The answer is: Because they literally aren’t feeling it.
And it seems to be getting worse. Despite an increase in wages most recently (2.9% as of August of 2018), income inequality has increased, leading even more to feel they aren't keeping up. While the stock market has benefited those with savings and 401(k)s, most don’t feel it.
Net worth not increasing. NY Times
Point 2: Workers Are Struggling
The second piece of evidence I want to point out is the level of financial stress we see among workers. Look at some of these statistics:
40% of Americans had trouble paying for food, medical care, housing, or utilities in the last year. Nearly half of Americans have no retirement savings, creating increases in stress-related illnesses and heart disease 63% of Americans do not have $500 of cash on hand to handle emergencies or other significant expenses 70% of college grads have $15,000 or more of loans outstanding in their first year of work 4 in 10 Americans now have a “sides hustle” to make more money to help make ends meet[9] Employers like Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, Ubers, and Outback Steakhouse are now building programs to pay people every day, so they can better manage their cash.
In my industry, the domain of Human Resources, the demand for “real-time payroll” is so high that companies like ADP and SAP are rewriting their payroll software. This is one of the most massive re-engineering projects in HR software I have seen in 20 years.
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and although wages are rising, almost everyone I talk with tells me they feel like they are falling behind. Housing prices in many cities are skyrocketing, the cost of transportation continues to rise, and the Deloitte Global Millennial survey shows that 45% of Millennials now believe they will never achieve the financial status of their parents. Unbelievably, almost 40% of them are doing side-hustles to make more money.
Point 3: Companies Are Sitting On Cash But Not Raising Wages
HR and business leaders are well aware of these financial issues, yet are afraid to raise wages.
Apple, for example, recently announced that its quarterly revenue grew to $61 billion (making it a $250 billion company) and that it generated $13.8 billion in profit (almost 23% profit). This means that for every dollar you spend on an Apple product or service, 23 cents goes to the bank.
What is Apple doing with this money? They’re returning it to the shareholders. The company announced it will distribute $210 billion to shareholders through stock buy-backs and will increase its dividend as well. If you own Apple stock, you see a good return, but if you’re an Apple employee, you may or may not see a thing. (P.S. Apple pays only a 14.5% tax rate.)
Apple, by the way, has about 80,000 employees, so if the average employee makes $100,000 per year (which is high), Apple could give them all a 5% raise, and it would only cost the company $400 million per year, which is less than 0.2% of the cash the company is using for stock buybacks.
In other words, Apple management believes it is better for the company to return cash to the shareholders (which enriches its stock price) than it is to invest in the salaries of its employees.
I’m not saying Apple is underpaying its people. Apple employees are well paid (software engineers make well over $100,000) and sales and service representatives are fairly paid. The point is to consider how management is thinking: at a time when the company is flooded with profit, management chose to invest in its share price. Companies do not see employees as an investment.
(A recent article in Business Insider shows that companies repurchased $4.4 trillion since the 2008 recession, $191 billion in this last quarter alone). This is money just being returned to the shareholders – why isn’t it being invested in employees?
Why are companies afraid to raise wages? Economists often point to the “Sticky Wages” effect.
As economists teach in school, management hates to raise wages because once you raise them, it’s hard to take them back down. And in the inevitable time of a recession or slowdown, you’re stuck with a high cost of labor.
Managers are acting this way now. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal points out how bonuses and benefits are going up, but wages are relatively flat. Companies are willing to pay as much as $25,000 bonus to diesel electricians and train crew members, but they don’t want to raise base pay. (Even Amazon’s announcement to raise wages to $15 per hour was coupled with a reduction in stock rewards.)
Wages stagnating.
Point 4. The Sticky Wage Theory Has Flaws
I’ve been talking with economists about this issue, and the “sticky wage” theory is firmly embedded in peoples’ minds. In this theoretical construct, wages are slow to rise because they’re even slower to fall. So managers hold onto cash and delay salary increases because they know how hard it will be to cut them later.
But my research shows this philosophy has flaws, especially in a skills-driven economy like we have today.
Suppose a company like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Goldman, or another “trillion dollar cap” digital disruptor decides to pay people more. They bid up the price of labor and pay people high wages to attract the very best.
(Amazon, for example, gives all its employees stock options, which are often worth tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in only a few years.)
These high performing companies just ignore the sticky wage theory and act like winning sports teams, bidding high prices for the super performers. Do they create wage inflation and make inequality worse? Not necessarily.
When a company raises the wages of all its workers, including the frontline service workers, something entirely different happens. Employees feel more committed; their financial lives become less stressful; they are proud to be part of the company; their attitude and service to customers and client get better. In fact, the company’s employment brand becomes more positive, so every position now attracts more committed, passionate, ambitious people – and ultimately the company performs better.
Zeynep Ton, in the heavily researched book The Good Jobs Strategy, clearly points this out as she compared wages between Costco, Mercadona, Tesco, and Wal-Mart. Her research showed that higher wages in retail result in a more profitable operation. The reason? Well paid employees are better trained, they are more engaged, and they spend more time helping customers buy the right products. In one of the studies, they found that a $1.00 increase in hourly wages resulted in a 40% increase in total profits, a hugely positive return on investment.
What about the problem of a business downturn? The sticky wage theory would say that you have less flexibility to reduce cost.
Well, in fact, the opposite is true. If managers are underpaying people now, the option of “reducing pay” is limited, so when the business turns down managers have to lay people off. While layoffs are common, they almost always result in a negative outcome. Not only does the company’s employment brand suffer, but the “survivor syndrome” of those who remain dramatically reduces their loyalty and engagement.
Extensive studies done by Wayne Casio at the University of Denver and academics at MIT and Wharton prove that companies that lay people off then later underperform for years. I distinctly remember how Circuit City tried to “layoff its way to profitability” and eventually went out of business. American Express and other great brand have seen this problem when they lay people off, so it’s not just an indication of a company with a poor product or out of sync offering. Layoffs are permanently damaging.
On the other hand, if you pay people well from the start and they feel a genuine commitment to the company, they will do anything to help manage a downturn. Southwest Airlines did not lay people off during the 2008 recession, and they continue to thrive. Steve Jobs famously reinvested in innovation during the 2000 recession and gave birth to the iPad.
When people are well paid you have enormous flexibility to ask people to take a temporary pay cut, and they will stick around and work even harder. (Intel, a company that has been through many business cycles, is famous for investing during recessions because it’s a time to attract some of the brightest and most sought-after people.)
Point 5: This Is A Management Issue, Not an Economic Issue
The bottom line is this: lagging wages in the U.S. is not an economic issue, it’s really about management. The spirit is there, but the actions are not.
Just as Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce believes “inclusive capitalism” is his mission, and Jeff Bezos is funding a $2 billion fund to help homelessness, and many other CEOs are trying to take on social causes, they are reluctant to act with their paychecks. And this old way of thinking is holding the economy back.
Let me make another important point. In business school we are taught that labor is an expense to be managed. CFOs look at the cost of payroll (which is often 40 or 50% of revenue) as one of the biggest discretionary expenses on the income statement.
But in reality people aren't an expense, they are an investment. As I like to point out in my talks, people are an appreciating asset: the more we invest in them, the more we see productivity, customer service, innovation, and growth. And in today's labor market, raising wages lets employers attract the most ambitious people, something every company is striving for now.
I think we have to rethink our accounting practices too: consider labor an investment like machinery. But one that goes up in value, not down.
Also, Pay Practices Are Out Of Date
As I've looked into this issue, one of the problems we found is that pay practices are out of date.
We recently did a large study of pay practices and found that only 7% of companies believe their pay system is aligned with their corporate goals and 30% told us it was misaligned.
Why? The way we pay people is based on legacy models. We only review wages annually; we are afraid to overpay high performers; we are afraid to explain to people why they are paid what they are.
When we asked employees and HR people to rate their pay practices, we found a net promoter score of -15, the lowest of any HR practice we have studied.
Why is it so hard to fix pay practices? Not only are CFOs holding companies back, but the HR department is partly in the way. Companies are concerned about pay equality, salary bands, carefully staying within benchmarks, and not providing a holistic view of pay. People want to be paid more frequently, they want a wider range of benefits, and they want programs that meet their particular needs, not just lists of programs they never plan to use.
The pressure to fix pay is building. Research from TIAA Institute found that 40% of U.S. adults rate C, D, or F in financial literacy; 1/3 of Americans pay their minimum credit card balance and the average credit card debt is $5,839, and the median retirement balance is only $3,000 (50% of American households have no saving). In other words, there’s plenty of pain out there, and if employers fill these gaps they gain tremendous engagement from their people.
If you want to put a simple ROI on better pay, consider the impact of poor financial wellbeing. The same TIAA research I cited earlier shows that 64% of millennials feel financially stressed (15% of their salaries goes toward student loans), 32% say it impacts their daily work, and 33 peer-reviewed studies proved that financial stress leads to heart attacks.
A Call To Business Leaders and Management
I talk with HR managers, employees, and young professionals every day. Despite the job numbers they are not happy with their pay and they are scrambling around to keep up. The problem isn’t the mystical “economy,” it’s simply the way CEOs and managers think.
Imagine if the top companies who purchased back stock int least ten years (Apple, $102 billion; Microsoft: $878 billion; Cisco: $228 billion; Oracle: $67 billion; JPM Chase, $63 billion; Wells Fargo, $56 billion; Intel: $55 billion; Home Depot: $51 billion) took a tiny percent of this money and raised the wages of their lower-wage customer-facing employees. Would the company feel it? I believe not – and their performance as a business would rise.
What I believe is going on is a new paradigm of management, one where CEOs and CFOs must understand that every employee provides an outsized value to the company. And if we consider them as an asset and not an expense, we find that the return on higher pay is greater than we thought.
If you don't want to raise wages, I'd ask another simple question. Given the highly competitive nature of the job market, what will you do? Well-being programs and other benefits are growing, but they aren't enough.
Let's not just blame the "economy" for income inequality and slowly rising wages. I'd encourage you to think about your business differently, and remember that in today's service-driven economy, people are the product. Invest more in people, and profits will follow.
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57e1c18b48843cdd83edf66e341ceb9c | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshfreedman/2013/09/20/the-typical-college-student-is-not-a-typical-college-student-and-other-fun-college-demographics-data/ | The Typical College Student Is Not A 'Typical' College Student (And Other Fun College Demographics Data) | The Typical College Student Is Not A 'Typical' College Student (And Other Fun College Demographics Data)
When most people in business, the media, or politics talk about “college,” they are referring to tree-lined idylls filled with prestigious libraries and terrible dining hall food. They are talking about the four-year schools, usually private nonprofit ones like Harvard, Princeton, or Stanford in which students live in dormitories, frolic in the quadrangles, and enmesh themselves among the great books under the tutelage of the greatest intellects.
When I talk about college, I often am thinking of these schools, too – after all, I attended one of them, although I did not frolic up to my full potential. But the experience for most college students is nothing at all like this. More often than not, colleges are not peaceful havens in the woods but rather, as Zachary Karabell writes, “one- and two-story industrial concrete buildings where millions of immigrants, middle-aged women, and lower-middle-class students are trying to obtain the degree that they hope will give them that ineluctable edge in the thrivingly insecure economy of the United States today.”
Karabell (who has degrees from Columbia, Oxford, and Harvard) wrote those words in 1998.* With my colleague Clare McCann, I pulled together some data about what the actual college student looks like. The data show that the trend that Karabell pointed out 15 years ago is even truer today. (All references here are to undergraduate education and are derived from the Department of Education’s IPEDS, NPSAS, or Digest of Education data and use the most recent years for which data is available).
In 2009-2010, only 16% of college students attended a private, not-for-profit four-year institution. This includes well-regarded Ivy League schools, small liberal arts colleges, and religious institutions that range from tiny to massive depending on how far away from the coast you are. 72% of college students attended a public university. Overall, the largest group of students is neither four-year public college students nor four-year private non-profit students but two-year public school students. Nearly four in ten college students are community college students. More than twice as many students were enrolled at two-year public colleges than at private, nonprofit ones – despite the fact that the programs are half as long.
In addition to displaying important information about college attendance, this chart has a nice... [+] color scheme.
At private, for-profit universities, which account for about 11.5% of all undergraduate enrollment, the picture of a typical student is even more different. The median age of a student at a for-profit university is 27, while the median number of children per student one. In other words, the average student at a for-profit school is a parent as well as a student and is probably far too busy to even think about a frolic.
Although it is easy to imagine ivy-walled dorms and young, eager students staying up late in residential lounges to discuss things they are unqualified to talk about, this image also applies to very few students. Only 14% of all college students – or 25% of full-time students – live on campus. Meanwhile, 24% of students (in both the full-time and part-time statistics) live at home with their parents. In other words, just as many students are typical on-campus college students as are commuting to school from their parents’ house.
The vast majority of students don’t graduate on time, either. In fact, most students don’t graduate at all. For new first-time, full-time students in the class of 2009 at four-year institutions, only 39% completed a degree in four years. 58% completed a degree within six years. At two-year colleges, 31% of the 2008 cohort graduated within three years of starting. At two-year public colleges, which educate the greatest share of students, this number was only 20%.
These bars don't tell us if students are learning, but they do tell us if they're graduating.
Why, then, do we continue to think of college more as “Animal House” than “Community”? Perhaps one of the answers lies in the fact that our views are related to our own experiences – and many of our leaders have attended frolic-heavy institutions. Of the 5 schools that produced four or more current U.S. senators, all of them are elite private, nonprofit, four-year universities (9 out of the 13 schools that have multiple undergraduate alumni in the Senate are of this category as well; the other four are large four-year public universities in the South).
Harvard keeps graduating future senators despite having unattractive school colors.
College is not one singular beast. If anything, it is a variety of beasts – very few of which resemble what many of us, or many of those in positions of leadership, have ever had a chance to wrestle.
*Full, although very insignificant, disclosure: Karabell is a member of the board of my organization.
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e21fa1e1edeebb314ffccbcf4b7fd437 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshfreedman/2014/02/11/student-loans-are-a-big-drag-on-the-economy-and-society/ | Student Loans Are A Drag On The Economy And Society | Student Loans Are A Drag On The Economy And Society
(This is part two of a five-part series on how we pay for college. Read part one here.)
The shift from greater public funding of higher education to individuals financing their own education through debt has put more risk on individual students. But it also has potentially negative social and economic effects that spread beyond the college campus.
While loans are intended to expand college access to a broader population, the nature of risk that they entail also produces the opposite result. Low- and middle-income students worried about the consequences of taking out a loan will be more likely to decide that college attendance is not worth the risk. What we intended as a mechanism of educational expansion, then, is working at cross-purposes with itself. Sociologists Rachel Dwyer, Laura McLoud, and Randy Hodson put it best: “There is a certain irony that those who were expected to benefit most from expanded college access are also most vulnerable to the risks of carrying too much debt.”
Scaring away college students before they begin college, however, is a relatively small problem compared to others. Studies have found that high debt levels not only deter access at the beginning, but can also drive students away from completing college once they have already started. Except for Mark Zuckerberg, students who start college but do not graduate are stuck with loan repayments and no college degree. They still have to repay their loans but do not have the economic boost of a college degree to help them have enough income to cover this cost. Many students who are defaulting on loans fall into this category of students with debt but no degree.
A second issue with increasing levels of student loan debt is the effect on the economy. In a widely discussed brief last year (as widely discussed as briefs can be), data from the New York Fed suggested a macroeconomic drag due to student loan debt in the wake of the Great Recession. Individuals with more student loan debt were less likely than individuals without student loan debt to purchase homes or cars.
While there is not enough data to make a conclusive statement based on this single study alone, this conclusion fits with broader evidence that high private debt levels are a drag on economic growth. In the wake of the financial crash, households have been trying to deleverage, or pay down their debt so they can have a healthier financial outlook, reduce the amount of their income that they use to service their debt, and begin investing and consuming again. During the deleveraging process, household spending is constrained, serving as an impediment to a healthy economy. Numerous studies have shown that the debt overhang of households from the mortgage crash in 2007-08 has been an enormous drag on the economic recovery. Additionally, high levels of household debt leave the economy more vulnerable to overall shocks like a financial crisis. This can make downturns more severe and difficult to climb out of.
A look at the data suggests that student loans have slowed down households in the process of paying down debt. Since 2008 — the peak level of household debt — households lowered their levels every type of debt except student loan debt. Student loans have continued to grow throughout this process of deleveraging.
But aren’t people facing poor job prospects just taking out more loans to avoid working as baristas at coffee shops that drip the coffee super slowly for no apparent reason? This does not appear to be the case from the debt data. Student loan debt has grown at almost exactly the same rate since the crash as it had been the previous five years — i.e. steadily and without fail.
A second consideration in determining the economic drag of student loans is the distribution of debt. If debt is concentrated among high-income students, the economic drag will be less than if it is concentrated among the poor or middle class. Looking at public four-year institutions, the problem of debt is distributed all across the income ladder. Nearly 70 percent of all college graduates with a bachelor’s degree from a public institution have student loan debt. As Pell Grants have failed to keep up with the cost of college, more low-income students are relying on loans to pay for school. According to data from the Department of Education, 44% of all dependent undergraduate students in 2012 from families with less than $30,000 in income had student loan debt levels of more than $12,400. For middle class families (defined here as families with incomes between $30,000 and $106,000), well over half of students had debt at $12,400 or higher.
In other words, debt levels are high across the board and rising – even as households have been trying to pay down all other forms of debt. The hypothesis that student loan debt affects household spending in the economy appears very plausible. As student loan levels continue to pile up for students of all incomes, the burden of interest payments in addition to paying back the principal of the loans will serve to constrain the economy even more. And because the student loan system fails to stem the cost problem at colleges and universities, it creates a vicious cycle: the loan system allows colleges to raise prices, which causes more students to take out loans. States, facing budget pressures, have also pulled back on investment, putting even more risk on students and further increasing the need for loans.
The risk and burdens that come from forcing students to take out debt up front and pay it back later is problematic from head to toe (tassel to hem, one might say). To create a better system of higher education, we need to look at alternatives to the current debt-financed model.
Check back tomorrow for part three of the series on how we pay for college, focused on income-based loan repayment.
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12feadc7cba674d7c9c2cef439fa9690 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshfreedman/2014/02/14/the-promise-of-free-public-higher-education/ | The Promise Of Free Public Higher Education | The Promise Of Free Public Higher Education
(This is the final part of a five-part series on how we pay for college. Read parts one, two, three, and four.)
In the last four parts of this series, I have discussed the problems of our current student loan system, the potential for an income-based repayment system, and the difficulties of a graduate tax. This leaves us with another proposal: universal free undergraduate public higher education.
You could have said, Josh, we knew you were going to advocate free public college from the beginning; why did you spend 7,000 words to get here? To which I say: You’ve just generated a bunch of advertising revenue for Forbes. So thank you. Forbes thanks you, too.
A full discussion of higher education cannot be complete without discussing pre-K, elementary, and secondary education policies that dictate how prepared students are for college going in, as well as labor market policies that set the rules of the game for students once they leave college with or without a diploma. Yet understanding how we pay for college is an important part of the debate. Analyzing the problems we have in the system and the potential solutions is crucial for thinking about education reform in the long-term.
Free public higher education is an idea outside of the mainstream, and full implementation is a political impossibility anytime soon. But it is worth thinking about a broader vision of what higher education can and should achieve, and the best way of getting there. On its merits, free public undergraduate higher education solves many of the problems that plague the current system. And even if full reform is a distant goal, small tinkering in that direction holds promise. Already, Tennessee’s governor, Republican Bill Haslam, proposed making all two-year college free for students.
How can free public higher education address the issues facing the higher education system today?
Risk Pooling: Free public higher education pools risk as widely as possible, whereas individual loans put all risk on the individual. If college is free, there is no risk for an individual who might later face hardship and be unable to pay. The costs are borne widely across the population, ensuring that the funding base is as stable as possible. In an economic downturn, schools will be more insulated from economic shocks and more able to deliver a quality education.
Incentives: Individuals of all income levels are encouraged to attend school because they do not face the deterrent of high costs or risks. Schools have less incentive to only admit wealthy students because a school’s revenue no longer comes from the tuition of the well-to-do.
Progressivity: Whether a system of public higher education is regressive or progressive depends on how taxes are collected. If the tax base comes from income, rather than sales, a system of free public higher education will be more progressive. Free public higher education requires that even students who attend private colleges would have to pay to support the public system. This is progressive, as students who attend private colleges are on average wealthier.
Cost Control: If schools are funded publicly, there is a clear limit as to how much they can spend. They cannot increase their spending and pass off the increase to tuition because tuition will no longer exist. Free higher education might seem expensive, but it is, in a way, actually the opposite: it is the most direct way to keep costs down. In a higher education system that has exploited the intersection of public and private dollars to become increasingly expensive, a more public system will stop higher education inflation. Funding higher education through complex tax deductions and repayment plans, not to mention subsidizing loans at for-profit universities, ends up costing the government plenty of money as is; while it will be costly to provide free higher education, eliminating the spate of labyrinthine funding programs will save some money at the same time. Robert Samuels argues that this is possible. He writes, “Looking at various state and federal tax breaks and deductions for tuition, it might be possible to make all public higher education free by just using current resources in a more effective manner.”
Access: Cost cannot be a barrier when there is no cost. (This is not strictly true, because there is always an opportunity cost. But you get my point.) Free public higher education is the most direct way to dispel the notion that the poor cannot afford higher education; for all the well-intentioned efforts to get more low-income students into college, the easiest way to do so is to prove they can afford it by making it free. Free higher education would also get rid of complicated financial aid forms and tax code-based benefits that deter students from attending and fail to help most students afford school.
Communal Goods: Unlike every other finance option, free public higher education affirms the role of college as a public program that every person has access to, can benefit from, and has a stake in supporting. Individualizing the costs and gains of higher education strips college of this fundamental meaning.
A few common objections arise to this proposal. First, making higher education free will be expensive. This is true, but we also have to consider the cost of our current semi-private, semi-public system. The federal government already spends tons of money backhandedly subsidizing higher education, and because the government is unable to control costs it ends up spending more than it has to. As in healthcare, we spend a greater share of our GDP on higher education than any other advanced industrialized country – yet have worse access to colleges and universities than our peers. We will likely have to spend more federal or state money to make higher education free, but a program of free public higher education will be a direct way to keep costs down. It could be a worthwhile investment to make college more affordable and more accessible, even if it ends up costing a bit more money overall.
Second, many people argue that we already suffer from too many people going to college, not too few people going to college. This argument is important, but it falls short. Although it is definitely true that most jobs will not require a four-year bachelor’s degree, most people do need some sort of postsecondary training. As Bill Haslam noted in his State of the State address, “College is not for everybody, but it has to be for a lot more people than it’s been in the past if we’re going to have a competitive workforce.” Data from Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce estimates that almost two thirds of new jobs will require some college, even if most of these do not require a bachelor’s degree.
At the same time, the argument that “too many people” are attending college misses an important point about who is and is not attending. Many students who want to attend college but come from lower- and middle-income backgrounds either cannot afford it or are deterred by the prospect of student debt. We want to create a system, like the Truman Commission envisioned in 1947, in which financial background is not a barrier for anyone who wants to and is able to attend college. Free college would allow more students from all backgrounds to be able to attend college if they want. And for many, college is about more than short-term job prospects – it is an important life achievement for students and a jumping-off point for lifelong skill-building and learning.
Third, some would argue that students should bear some risk – after all, it is an “investment” and they do accrue many of the gains of the education. If an undergraduate education is free, they argue, there will be a horde of dillydallying students who can stay in school forever and never get a degree. There might be a few of these dillydallyers; in any system, there will be a few people who take advantage of the system. But overall, this argument is problematic.
Under free higher education, students do bear some risk. If they choose to forego two or four years of being in the workforce, they have to bear the opportunity cost of missing out on this income. They also have to pay for living expenses and books. For low-income students, programs like Pell Grants or other federal direct grants can cover these costs, making college actually free and feasible. For everyone else, there is still some personal investment and skin in the game. And it is still an investment -- it is just a collective investment, rather than an individual one.
Fourth, there are concerns that lowering the cost of higher education will lower its quality. This is certainly a possibility; any change can bring with it negative outcomes. But for many public schools, ranging from community colleges to flagship universities, free public college could just as easily improve the quality of education. It could redirect resources from buildings and sports teams -- sorry, sports teams -- toward teaching and learning. It could increase the number of low-income, high-quality students who are currently being shut out of the system. Many other advanced industrialized countries, such as our friendly northern neighbor Canada, have much free-er higher education systems that maintain top-quality public institutions and serve a much broader portion of the population. If any change that tries to rebalance the system will be written off because it could decrease the quality of education, we are going to continue to have an expensive, unjust, and unsustainable system of higher education.
Rather than be pushed aside as crazy, these ideas about how to better fund college are worth discussing as our education system becomes increasingly expensive and arcane. We are very far from a graduate tax, let alone free public higher education for all. But, as David Callahan of Demos optimistically notes, “A new education norm can be glimpsed on the horizon: P-16, free for all Americans.” As some states and plenty of other countries have realized, moving toward a system of free public higher education might just be the best option we have for improving the convoluted and destabilizing way we finance college now.
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dddc617480d3f58492bf9590ccd15f38 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshkatzowitz/2015/11/10/deontay-wilder-i-could-beat-wladimir-klitschko-tomorrow/ | Deontay Wilder: I Could Beat Wladimir Klitschko Tomorrow | Deontay Wilder: I Could Beat Wladimir Klitschko Tomorrow
If Deontay Wilder had the chance to fight Wladimir Klitschko in the next year, he'd sign the contract as soon as possible. If they fought next month, Wilder would like his chances. Heck, if Wilder had the chance next week to take the three belts that Klitschko currently holds and unify the heavyweight championship, Wilder would immediately start getting his hands taped.
With a 35-0 record and 34 knockouts to his name, Wilder is the most exciting American heavyweight since Baltimore's Hasim Rahman traded championship knockouts with Lennox Lewis at the beginning of this century. The fact that Wilder is entertaining outside of the ring as well only helps his Q-rating and his growing fanbase. But his confidence could make him the complete package.
An American hasn't been considered THE heavyweight champ of the world since Evander Holyfield in the 1990s, and Wilder would have to go through Klitschko (64-3, 53 KOs) -- who hasn't lost a bout in 11 years -- in order to make that happen. Wilder, who sparred with Klitschko in 2012, knows that it will.
"If it was tomorrow, I could beat him," Wilder recently told Forbes. "I've improved so much since 2012, and he's declining. He's getting older. He's not going to be the same as he was. We know each other, and I know how to beat him. I know what it takes. He doesn't have as much energy as I do. I'm the toughest, the strongest and the fastest heavyweight he's faced."
Deontay Wilder beat Johann Duhaupas in September, but he's still been criticized for an... [+] underwhelming resume. (Photo by David A. Smith/Getty Images)
For now, though, Wilder isn't in line to fight Klitschko, who will face Tyson Fury on Nov. 28 in Germany. And Wilder -- whose mandatory opponent for his belt is Alexander Povetkin but who, according to ESPN, could face Czar Glazkov (21-0-1, 13 KOs) in January -- is content to wait.
After all, he's 30 years old and, thanks to the fact that he's fought 10 times in the last 35 months, he's in prime shape. Klitschko, while still the most dominant and longest-running heavyweight champ since Larry Holmes, is 39 years old. He obviously isn't getting younger, and little by little, his reflexes (though probably not his power) are worsening. There's no getting around that for Klitschko.
But Wilder also doesn't think he'll have to wait for too much longer. Every time somebody mentions Klitschko's name to him, Wilder envisions the month of September 2016.
"Everybody will be clear of mandatories then. He wants it; I want it," Wilder said. "Why not? Let's do it once and for all. I'm very confident in what I'm going to do. For me as time passes by, it's more a benefit to me than it is to him. I haven't even peaked as a heavyweight yet. If I were him, I'd try to fight me right now."
It certainly would add a huge serving of polish to Wilder's resume -- which, for the most part, is rather lacking. That's actually the biggest criticism that Wilder receives. Clearly he's got power, and as showed when winning a 12-round decision against Bermane Stiverne to win the title, Wilder isn't solely a knockout artist. But people look at who he's fought, and the lack of notable names is immediately apparent -- even Klitschko has given his opinion on the matter.
The win vs. Stiverne was impressive -- "I displayed I can take a punch, I can go 12 rounds, I can box, I can fight on the inside and the outside," Wilder said -- but other than that, Wilder's opponents have been ordinary, especially since winning his title. But Wilder doesn't seem bothered by that criticism. Not every opponent can be an elite fighter, he said, and since he fights so often as compared to most other high-level boxers, he's sure to take on at least a few opponents that don't garner much recognition.
Men like Eric Molina and Johann Duhaupas -- who were a combined 55-4 before facing Wilder but who couldn't be picked out of a lineup by most of the world's boxing fans. Wilder beat both of them in the past five months, but it wasn't as easy as it had been in the past -- Molina lasted until the ninth round and Duhaupas the 11th. Aside from Stiverne, they are the longest ever to last in a match vs. Wilder.
They were seen by the boxing public more as quantity instead of quality. But were they?
"It's a balance," Wilder said. "How do you determine what's quality? Let's say you get one guy who's undefeated and beats everybody. What are you going to label him as? He's quality? But if you knock him out in the first round, he's quantity. Let's say you fight somebody who has some losses, and he's tougher than the guy you thought was going to be quality. You just never know what type of fighter you're going to bring."
We know, of course, what label Klitschko would receive, and Povetkin, who's 30-1 with 22 knockouts and whose only defeat came in a shutout loss to Klitschko in 2013, also would get that "quality" label. But Wilder is even more confident about facing Povetkin.
"Whether it's here or in Russia, I'm going to whip his a--," the 6-foot-7 Wilder said. "To the credit of Stiverne, he moves his head just a little bit. Povetkin doesn't move his head at all. He can't fight a tall fighter. I'm much more mobile, more athletic and faster than Klitschko. It's going to be an easy fight. I might land every punch I throw."
Either way, Wilder plans on being around and making a large impact for a long time to come. Maybe in September 2016, he'll prove it to the rest of us.
"I will bring back heavyweight boxing to its full potential -- and probably beyond that," he said. "The heavyweight division fell off for a bit. Everybody blames it on the Klitschkos and the boring style they have and the boring personality. Whoever could unify that division, that's when that stardom begins, and when I retire, I want to be a hard act to follow."
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3a206e451c83785bb925e16e4d02c338 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshkatzowitz/2016/09/27/anthony-joshua-vs-wladimir-klitschko-who-would-win/ | Anthony Joshua Vs. Wladimir Klitschko: Who Would Win? | Anthony Joshua Vs. Wladimir Klitschko: Who Would Win?
Tyson Fury pulled out again of his heavyweight championship rematch with Wladimir Klitschko, and now Klitschko needs a fight. Anthony Joshua has already secured a Nov. 26 date at Manchester Arena, but he needs a challenger.
So, when at least one media member wondered aloud on Twitter why Joshua and Klitschko simply couldn’t get together for a fight in two months, this was the response from Joshua’s promoter.
Reached out to @Klitschko team - we love the fight! @anthonyfjoshua https://t.co/AGWWikjXTe — Eddie Hearn (@EddieHearn) September 24, 2016
Said Eddie Hearn on Monday to the Guardian: “This is a huge fight. I believe Klitschko against Joshua is a favorite for Nov. 26. This is a deal that would move very quickly. It has to, if we’re going to strike. I would like to get everything sewn up by the end of this week in terms of who Anthony Joshua is fighting next.
“It’s a fight that he really fancies. We know how dangerous it is, but Joshua is fresh, sharp, ready and he wants those big fights. Perhaps it’s a fight one or two too early for us, but Joshua is more than ready to take this challenge on.”
Wladimir Klitschko hasn't fought in 10 months but could face Anthony Joshua next. (Photo by Dan... [+] Istitene/Getty Images)
The fight, of course, might not get signed. After all, Joshua has other options, including a potential bout with rising superstar Joseph Parker or Hughie Fury – Tyson Fury’s cousin who now has an opening on his schedule after Andy Ruiz pulled out of their Oct. 29 fight. But a Klitschko-Joshua fight could be a fascinating matchup, and it’d be fun to fantasize about which would emerge as the victor.
That said, here are the reasons why both could win.
Why Klitschko (64-4, 53 knockouts) will beat Joshua:
1) He has way too much experience: Joshua has extensive amateur experience and won the Olympic gold medal in 2012. But Klitschko has 68 professional fights, and he ruled the heavyweight division for a decade. In contrast, Joshua’s toughest opponent, Dillian Whyte, had him in trouble early in their fight. Joshua, of course, survived that bout and ended up knocking out Whyte, but an experienced Klitschko wouldn’t let Joshua recover so easily.
2) He still has massive power: Though Klitschko looked rusty and, frankly, old during his loss to Fury last November, he still has some of the most impressive knockout power in the division. We’re still unsure about Joshua’s chin, and it’s almost assured that Klitschko, if he can rejuvenate himself, would test him there. After all, look what Whyte did in the second round of their matchup.
Why Joshua (17-0, 17 KOs) will beat Klitschko:
1) Not only is Klitschko slipping, he hasn’t fought lately: While Joshua has fought seven times since the beginning of 2015, Klitschko, at the age of 40, is not the same fighter he used to be. We all saw how bad Klitschko looked against Fury, and if he were to get Joshua in November, it would be a year since he fought, the longest layoff of his career. Meanwhile, Joshua is fresh and ready to fight.
Relaxing weekend with my family, got to work with my cuz on some boxing drills pic.twitter.com/McRcDM6tcO — Anthony Joshua (@anthonyfjoshua) September 26, 2016
Slippin shots #AJBoxing pic.twitter.com/zz1vlaMuzV — Anthony Joshua (@anthonyfjoshua) September 22, 2016
2) Joshua’s power would knock Klitschko back into next decade: Klitschko hasn’t been stopped in a fight since Lamon Brewster in 2004. Even though his boxing has improved so much in the last 12 years that he doesn’t take many flush shots to the chin, he hasn’t recently faced the kind of power that Joshua possesses. There's little doubt Joshua would find the slower Klitschko and test the sturdiness of his chin in his advanced years. Chances are, that wouldn’t bode well for Klitschko.
My prediction: Joshua is too young and fresh for Klitschko. Joshua will survive some shaky moments early in the fight after he tastes Klitschko’s power, but he’d get into a groove and stop Klitschko in the later rounds.
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77ea77fbe517bf816739dfc964610335 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshkatzowitz/2016/10/18/will-the-gennady-golovkin-danny-jacobs-anthony-joshua-wladimir-klitschko-fights-actually-happen/ | Will The Gennady Golovkin-Danny Jacobs, Anthony Joshua-Wladimir Klitschko Fights Actually Happen? | Will The Gennady Golovkin-Danny Jacobs, Anthony Joshua-Wladimir Klitschko Fights Actually Happen?
After an excruciatingly slow boxing month in October, bored fans could at least look forward to a slew of potentially exciting fights in the last two months of this year, including the Andre Ward-Sergey Kovalev matchup and the returns of Manny Pacquiao and rising star Vasyl Lomachenko.
But two of the biggest potential bouts still haven’t been signed, and now we must wonder if the Gennady Golovkin-Daniel Jacobs and Anthony Joshua-Wladimir Klitschko fights actually will occur.
Earlier this month, it seemed almost assured that Golovkin and his mandatory opponent, Jacobs, would come to an agreement, and late last week, it appeared that Joshua-Klitschko was only hours away from being announced.
Gennady Golovkin, left, is still in negotiations to defend his title vs. Daniel Jacobs. (Photo by... [+] Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)
Instead, the fighters are less than two months out from their respective dates (Golovkin is supposed to appear on Dec. 10 on HBO, while Joshua tentatively had a Nov. 26 date on Showtime that now also could move to Dec. 10), and still, we haven’t heard anything definitive.
With Golovkin vs. Jacobs, the two sides continue to negotiate with the possibility of the WBA calling for a purse bid, which would allow any licensed promoter to bid on the fight. While the WBA’s rules state that the champion (Golovkin) would receive 75% of the winning bid and the challenger (Jacobs) would take home 25%, Jacobs requested to make the split 60-40 in Golovkin’s favor. The sanctioning body turned down his request last week, but Tom Loeffler, Golovkin’s promoter, said both fighters still are interested in the matchup.
“I know both GGG and Jacobs want the fight,” Loeffler told Forbes on Monday in a text message. “Just working out the details to finalize it with Jacobs’ side.”
The deadline to complete negotiations was Oct. 12, meaning the WBA now could call for a purse bid. Or either fighter could walk away, especially if Jacobs feels like a 25% split is unfair. Considering the WBA has been calling Jacobs its “regular” middleweight champion – Golovkin (36-0, 33 knockouts) is considered the “super” champion – perhaps Jacobs (32-1, 29 KOs) has a point. He’s not some random mandatory challenger who deserves only one-fourth of the pie. Instead, he calls himself a world champion, because that’s exactly what the sanctioning body has said.
“I’m not saying to pay him what he wants,” welterweight great Juan Manuel Marquez told ESPN Deportes, via Boxing Scene, “but it sounds ridiculous to only offer 25% to Daniel Jacobs."
Loeffler said he’s still negotiating with Jacobs’ adviser, Al Heymon, “in order to get the fight done.”
Anthony Joshua, top, is negotiating to fight Wladimir Klitschko. (Photo by Leigh Dawney/Getty... [+] Images)
Meanwhile, the Joshua-Klitschko bout, which has been widely discussed since struggling heavyweight champion Tyson Fury withdrew from his rematch with Klitschko, seemed on the precipice of being announced. But Joshua’s promoter, Eddie Hearn, told Sky Sports that the issue of whether the WBA belt is on the line is preventing the final deal from being completed. Joshua already holds the IBF title, but with Fury relinquishing his WBA belt, both sides want that sanctioning body to bestow its strap on the winner of the fight.
"The deal is there but we are awaiting sanctioning from the WBA," Hearn said this week. “Both teams have written to the WBA to request sanctioning of our fight, but Wladimir wants the WBA belt to be on the line, so until that is approved, we cannot move forward."
Hearn said both sides could begin looking at other potential opponents. Which would be a disappointment for boxing fans, because a Joshua-Klitschko match could be a fun one to watch. Klitschko is hungry to regain the belts he lost to Fury last November, and at the age of 40, his time in the sport is likely running short. For Joshua (17-0, 17 KOs), a win against Klitschko (64-4, 53 KOs) would turn him into an even bigger star in his U.K. home, and a victory against one of the best heavyweights of the last few decades certainly would reverberate around the world and make Joshua the ruler of the division.
For now, though, it’s all still theoretical.
Said Hearn: “We expect news in the next few days, but in the meantime I believe both sides will look at alternative options for Dec. 10 while we hope to get the news we need to make the fight happen."
UPDATE: Loeffler told RingTV.com on Tuesday that a Golovkin-Jacobs fight won't occur this year.
@TomLoeffler1 has confirmed to me they're targeting early 2017 for @GGGBoxing and @DanielJacobsTKO. Golovkin will not fight before then. — Mitchell Abramson (@mabramson13) October 18, 2016
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91035509916a61c3882290234479f21a | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshkatzowitz/2017/04/26/anthony-joshua-will-beat-wladimir-klitschko-here-are-the-reasons-why/ | Anthony Joshua Will Beat Wladimir Klitschko: Here Are The Reasons Why | Anthony Joshua Will Beat Wladimir Klitschko: Here Are The Reasons Why
Anthony Joshua will surely beat Wladimir Klitschko when the two meet on Saturday in front of 90,000 fans at London’s Wembley Stadium. Of that, we can be sure – unless, of course, you read something that says the exact opposite.
Joshua, with his 18-0 record and his 18 KOs, is simply too good (and too strong) for the 41-year-old Wladimir Klitschko, who’s coming off one of the worst fights of his career – a unanimous decision loss to Tyson Fury, who took all of Klitschko’s titles in the process.
Now, it’s Joshua’s turn to try to send Klitschko (64-4, 53 KOs) into retirement, even as both men reportedly will earn a purse of £10million (about $12.8 million). Here are three reasons why it will happen.
Anthony Joshua will try ot keep his perfect record intact vs. Wladimir Klitschko. (Photo by Dan... [+] Mullan/Getty Images)
1) Joshua is the future of the division, and he will finally get to prove it: Yes, the heavyweight titlist’s resume is a little thin, and yes, Klitschko is much better than anybody Joshua has ever faced. But Joshua has the athleticism, the boxing savvy, and the punching power to take over the division, much the same way Klitschko did for the previous decade. Except Joshua will be more exciting to watch. "He's a great champion and I personally do not see too many heavyweights beating him, he's very strong,” Eric Molina, who was knocked out by Joshua last December, told Sky Sports, via Boxing Scene. "One thing that Joshua has shown is, he's getting bigger, better, faster, stronger, every fight. I don't want to disrespect Klitschko, but the torch is going to be passed that night. If it hasn't been already, I think it's going to officially get passed … yes, definitely he is the present and the future."
2) Klitschko is simply too old: Against Tyson Fury in November 2015, Klitschko looked absolutely awful and lost his heavyweight title belts. Now, he’s 41 years old, and he hasn’t fought in 17 months. He hasn’t scored a win in two years, and even then, he didn’t look great against Bryant Jennings. Klitschko, after 68 professional bouts, is well past his prime. The question is, can he rediscover any part of what made him great when he faces Joshua? According to Joshua, probably not. “He has to pass on the baton. I do hear it a lot, he's too old, he's faded,” Joshua told the BBC, via the Daily Mail. “ … Timing is everything and maybe Father Time has caught up with the former champ.”
Line 'em up, knock 'em down. @anthonyfjoshua vs. @Klitschko SATURDAY 4:15p ET/1:15p PT LIVE on @Showtime. #JoshuaKlitschko pic.twitter.com/D2pbVYy0tX — SHOWTIME Boxing (@ShowtimeBoxing) April 25, 2017
3) Did Fury do even more damage to Klitschko than can be seen with our eyes?: It’s possible that Fury – who, let’s get this straight, didn’t look all that great while beating Klitschko – decimated Klitschko’s confidence. Though Klitschko said he’s humble and hungry again, it’s unclear if Klitschko mentally can face off against a young fighter like Joshua who’s going to look to knock him out as soon as possible. “Tyson Fury destroyed Wladimir Klitschko mentally,” heavyweight titlist Deontay Wilder said this week. “… He was still shouting [insults] at him when he was getting in the ring [before the fight]. He broke Wladimir Klitschko. It was brilliant by Tyson Fury.” Has Klitschko recovered from that mental beatdown? Joshua certainly hopes not.
All of which means Joshua certainly will win. Unless the EXACT OPPOSITE happens.
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b6b3f4f08295efa135efa04f1878b8c0 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshkatzowitz/2017/04/26/wladimir-klitschko-will-beat-anthony-joshua-here-are-the-reasons-why/ | Wladimir Klitschko Will Beat Anthony Joshua: Here Are The Reasons Why | Wladimir Klitschko Will Beat Anthony Joshua: Here Are The Reasons Why
Wladimir Klitschko will surely beat Anthony Joshua when the two meet on Saturday in front of 90,000 fans at London’s Wembley Stadium. Of that, we can be sure – unless, of course, you read something that says the exact opposite.
Yes, Klitschko had a misstep in 2015 vs. Tyson Fury, not throwing nearly enough punches during his unanimous decision loss, but there’s a reason Klitschko ruled over the heavyweight division for a decade. It’s because he’s really good at knocking out opponents and he’s become really good at not getting knocked out himself.
Wladimir Klitschko hasn't fought in 17 months but says he's obsessed with beating Anthony Joshua... [+] (Photo by Johann Groder/Getty Images)
There’s little question that Joshua (18-0, 18 KOs) has more buzz and more momentum heading into this bout. He’s younger and fresher. But Joshua – who, like his opponent, reportedly will earn a purse of £10million (about $12.8 million) for Saturday’s fight – has never faced anyone like Klitschko (64-4, 53 KOs), and in the end, that lack of experience against a world-class heavyweight will prove to be his undoing. Here are three reasons why Klitschko will beat Joshua.
1) He still has his power: Maybe Klitschko is too old to beat Joshua over 12 rounds, but the last thing old fighters usually lose is their ability to knock out their opponents. And Klitschko has always had power.
Making matters more interesting is that Joshua’s chin hasn’t been tested often, but when Dillian Whyte hit him flush in their December 2015 fight, Joshua found himself in major trouble.
If Klitschko lands a straight right hand flush to Joshua’s chin, there’s a good chance Joshua won’t stand up to it.
2) Klitschko has too much experience: Joshua has never faced a fighter with this much experience, and it will show. Not only that, but Klitschko knows how to avoid getting hit flush. For some boxing fans, the memory of Klitschko getting knocked around the ring and eventually knocked out by Corrie Sanders in 2003 is an image that’s difficult to forget. But Klitschko hasn’t been stopped in a fight in the past 13 years, because he learned how to defend against an opponent’s best chance to beat him. That knowledge will come in handy vs. Joshua.
3) Klitschko is obsessed with getting his titles back: The hashtag #obsessed is all over his Twitter account.
Only ONE week to go. Nothing can stop me from reaching my goal. #obsessed #JoshuaKlitschko pic.twitter.com/k8Ddjwvxx8 — Klitschko (@Klitschko) April 22, 2017
Controlling my mind is the key to this fight. #obsessed #JoshuaKlitschko pic.twitter.com/8V9iz6KHUy — Klitschko (@Klitschko) April 11, 2017
He also apparently is excited about being a +190 underdog. “I actually talk to myself sometimes and I say ‘Wlad, you’re an underdog. It’s great, it’s beyond motivation and I just only can win, I can’t lose, I only can win,’” Klitschko told Sky Sports, via MaxBoxing.com. “… Sometimes with a lot of years of success you’re getting used to certain things in you and you’re getting maybe a little numb. It’s great that I had a little failure and failure is the key to success. I had failure recently, I lost my titles and in a certain way it’s good because there is a lot of excitement and motivation for me.”
All of which means Klitschko certainly will win. Unless the EXACT OPPOSITE happens.
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502d45b1e8acf338f6fb793061b368ca | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshkatzowitz/2017/04/29/anthony-joshua-wladimir-klitschko-live-results-reaction-purses-odds-ppv-buys-ticket-resales/ | Anthony Joshua Scores Career-Defining Win, Knocks Out Wladimir Klitschko in the 11th (VIDEO) | Anthony Joshua Scores Career-Defining Win, Knocks Out Wladimir Klitschko in the 11th (VIDEO)
Postfight: Not only did Joshua (19-0, 19 KOs) get the biggest win of his career. But he made himself a tens of millions, heck maybe hundreds of millions, of more dollars. He showed amazing resilience, and for as good as Joshua has been throughout his career, this was, by far, his most impressive performance. He took the best punches from Klitschko (64-5), and he survived to knock out a future Hall of Famer.
It was a great night for Joshua, and it was a great night for the sport.
And if Joshua gets a rematch with Klitschko -- and there is a contract for that -- he'll probably make another $20 million. If he fights Deontay Wilder or the U.K.'s Tyson Fury, he could perhaps make even more. Joshua has talked about becoming the sport's first billion dollar fight. He took a pretty good step toward that in London.
After the fight, Klitschko wouldn't confirm that he would take a rematch -- neither, for that matter, would promoter Eddie Hearn -- but he was complimentary of his opponent.
"The best man won tonight, and it's an amazing event for boxing," Klitschko told Sky Sports after the fight. "It's really sad I didn't make it tonight. I was planning to do it. It didn't work."
A rematch would be great for Joshua, now that he knows he can beat Klitschko. You know what else will help Joshua? He knows he can take massive punches from any heavyweight, and even if he falls to the canvas, he knows he can still win.
"It's boxing. I'm only going to improve," he told Sky Sports. "Sometimes you can be a phenomenal boxer, but boxing is about character. When you go to the trenches, that's when you find out who you really are."
11th round: Joshua lands a big right hand, and Klitschko is now hurt. He's holding on and moving away from him. A minute in, Joshua lands a left hook that was short and sweet. Massive uppercut for Joshua and Klitscho is down again. Whoa. He's struggling to his feet and he looks done. But he'll get to continue. Another right for Joshua, and an enormous left hook and Klitschko is down again. He's got one minute to survive the round. Klitschko's legs are gone, and ref David Fields stops the fight! It's over, and Klitschko didn't seem to complain for a moment.
This was the uppercut by Anthony Joshua that basically was the beginning of the end for Wlad Klitschko in the 11th. pic.twitter.com/5sDEVEJXJl — Josh Katzowitz (@joshkatzowitz) April 29, 2017
10th round: Joshua starts the round with a solid 1-2. He looks like he's got his second wind. Joshua with a nice counter right hand over a Klitschko jab. Left hook and then a right for Joshua. He's not hurting Klitschko but he's landing again. Toward the end of the head, it looked like both heads came together in a pretty nasty butt. Forbes scores it for Joshua.
Overall: Joshua 95-94
Ninth round: Klitschko is really bouncing around the ring in this round. Pretty extraordinary stuff from a 41-year-old. Klitschko still pumping out the jab, but with a minute left, Joshua lands a decent right. He's also been focusing more on the body this round, and it's been effective. Forbes scores it for Joshua.
Overall: 85-85
Eighth round: Klitschko tries a five-punch combination. Not much, if any of it, landed. Remember when everybody always wondered about Klitschko's stamina and whether he could last 12 rounds? Now, nobody questions it. Now, everybody wonders about Joshua. Klitschko is back to landing jabs. Joshua looks a little better this round, but he's not getting away from Wlad's jab. Forbes scores it for Klitschko.
Overall: Klitschko 76-75
Seventh round: Klitschko is still throwing combinations. You know what we haven't seen? Klitschko hasn't done much holding, and he hasn't tried to lean on Joshua. That might be a good strategy now to see if Joshua really is tired. Klitschko lands a left hook, but Joshua smiles and is talking back to Klitschko. Forbes scores it for Klitschko.
Overall: 66-66
Sixth round: I'm surprised Klitschko came back so ferociously after getting knocked down. You know what, I think Joshua is in a little bit of trouble here. I think he's really tired. He badly needs a second wind. Mind you, Joshua has never gone past seven rounds before. An enormous right hand by Wlad and then a left hook, and Joshua is down! He is in big time trouble. He gets up, but the end might be near if Klitschko lands something big again. That was the first time Joshua has ever been down. Klitschko just misses a left that would have ended the fight (probably). Now, Klitschko is landing his jab. But good job for Joshua to survive the onslaught. Forbes scores it for Klitschko.
Overall: Joshua 57-56
Fifth round: This time, Joshua comes out aggressive, and Klitschko is just trying to hold on. Then, a huge left hook by Joshua and Klitschko is down! He's up and throwing back. Klitschko is cut over the left eye. Klitschko looks winded. But Joshua is now chilling out. Now, Klitschko is getting more aggressive, and Joshua looks tired. His mouth is wide open. Klitschko lands a big time left and then an uppercut. And Joshua looks really hurt. This is a one helluva round. Joshua can barely stand up he's so tired. I think Klitschko wins the round. But give Joshua credit for the knockdown. Forbes scores it for Joshua (10-9, though).
Overall: Joshua 49-46
Fourth round: Again, Klitschko lands a right hand at the start of the round, and this one was a huge one. The best punch of the fight. Joshua took it OK, though. Joshua lands his own right, but it wasn't that powerful (easy for me to say, I know). Then, with a minute later, he lands another one over Klitschko's own right hand. Based on that one good right hand in the first 5 seconds of the round, I'm going with Klitschko here. Forbes scores it for Klitschko.
Overall: Joshua 39-37
Third round: Klitschko opens this round hitting Joshua with a right, the same as last round. Both men are throwing with more abandon now. Right uppercut by Joshua to a left hook, but it didn't look like it landed. Joshua is being more aggressive, lands a right to Klitschko's body. The Showtime stats say Joshua has thrown about twice as many jabs as Klitschko. That's not a good sign for Klitschko. Forbes scores it for Joshua.
Overall: Joshua 30-27
Second round: Klitschko immediately lands a sharp right to Joshua's head. Joshua might have rolled with it a bit to lessen the blow. Still, the best punch of the fight for either man so far. In the first round, the stats say Klitschko landed only 1 of 3 power punches. He obviously needs to throw more than that. Joshua's jab has been solid this round. Then, Joshua lands a decent right. Aside from the right hand, Klitschko isn't showing much. Forbes scores it for Joshua.
Overall: Joshua 20-18
First round: By the time the bell rang for the first round, Klitschko had been standing in the ring for about 20 minutes. You wonder if it's going to take him a few minutes to get warmed up again. Klitschko seems more aggressive than normal. Joshua lands a right early. Klitschko tries to land the jab. He lands a couple in the first half of the round. Joshua tries a combo but nothing really lands. Nothing much of consequence landed in the first, so this wasn't an easy round to score. Give it to Joshua, I guess. Forbes scores it for Joshua.
Overall: Joshua 10-9
Anthony Joshua ring walk: He seems much more relaxed than Klitschko. He's waving at people, and he's smiling. He's got a confident walk, as the crowd goes crazy. He stands on a ramp (the same ramp Klitschko power-walked through) as pyro goes off behind him and the White Stripes song "Seven Nation Army" gets the crowd chanting. Now, he's lifted up in the air by scissor lift with a flaming "A" and "J" on either side of him. He shadowboxes, and he's eventually lowered to the ground by the scissor lift. Finally, he enters the ring, and we're almost ready to begin.
Meanwhile, Klitschko waits and waits and waits.
Klitschko has been in the ring awhile. He's pacing all over, bobbing back and forth, eyes closed at time waiting for Joshua to hit the ring — Dan Rafael (@danrafaelespn) April 29, 2017
Wladimir Klitschko ring walk: We haven't seen Klitschko have to walk to the ring first in quite a while. He's been a champion so long that he's always been afforded the second slot. The crowd is electric, and the Showtime announcers say they're having hard time hearing each other. The crowd heartily boos the former unified champ, and, like usual, he's accompanied to the ring by the Red Hot Chili Peppers song "Can't Stop." Klitschko looks like he means business. He's not smiling. He's power-walking with a purpose on the long walk to the ring. One could say that he's glowering. On the right sleeve of his robe is the word "#obsessed." This is a man who looks like he knows his career might be over if he comes out the loser today.
Wembley Stadium: This is what the stadium looks like with the ring that's about to be surrounded by 90,000 people.
Wembley Stadium before the fight begins. (Photo by Dan Mullan/Getty Images)
The resale market: The Joshua-Klitschko bout sold out rather quickly when they were put on sale in December and then again in January, and some people are so enthused to see the fight, some enterprising soul reportedly put two tickets on a resale website for £35,199 apiece, which translates to $43,911, according to Boxing Scene.
When interviewed by The Fight Guys radio show earlier this month, promoter Eddie Hearn didn’t seem surprised.
“Any big event, if it’s boxing or soccer or Adele or Ed Sheeran, when there’s demand, there’s going to be a huge secondary market as well,” he said. “… When we sold the final ticket for this event, we had 34,500 people still in the online queue. That leads us to believe we could have sold another 100,000 tickets for this fight. That’s staggering.”
Odds: Though it seems like most boxers and boxing experts think Joshua will win, the odds are pretty close to even (though more money has come in lately on Joshua). On Saturday afternoon, Bovada had it like this:
Joshua -260
Klitschko +200
Here’s a look at four bets you might want to make, including wagering for the fight to go the full 12 rounds at +250 or for both fighters to hit the canvas at least once at +900.
Purses: Joshua and Klitschko reportedly will both earn purses of between £10-£15 million ($12.8-$19.4 million) for the fight. Considering Joshua reportedly earned £3million vs. Dillian Whyte in their December 2015 fight and £1.5 million vs. Dominic Breazeale six months later, this is a big-time upgrade for Joshua.
PPV Buys: Though the fight will be shown for free in the U.S. with those who have Showtime or HBO subscriptions, this is a PPV fight for those who live in the U.K. And it should be a hot seller.
According to the Telegraph, Sky Sports Boxing Office is estimating that the fight will garner 1.5 million buys for revenue of £30 million. As the Express points out, the previous record for Sky Sports was 1.15 million buys for the Floyd Mayweather-Manny Paquiao showdown in 2015 (that’s also the U.S. record with 4.6 million buys).
If Joshua-Klitschko earns that estimated £30 million, it would make for the richest fight in Britain’s history, beating the Carl Froch-George Groves rematch of £22 million in 2014.
The biggest fight in the heavyweight division in years is finally here, and when Anthony Joshua steps into the ring vs. Wladimir Klitschko, it still feels like a 50-50 fight. Joshua is the 27-year-old with worlds of potential and strong punching power. Klitschko is the experienced pugilist, a 41-year-old who ruled the heavyweight division for a decade but is coming off a bad loss and a 17-month layoff.
The fight will take place in front of 90,000 fans packed into London’s Wembley Stadium, and the atmosphere in Joshua’s home country promises to be electric. That likely will give him an advantage. But Klitschko hasn’t been stopped in a fight for 13 years, and it’s unclear if Joshua (18-0, 18 KOs) is actually good enough to last 12 rounds against Klitschko (64-4, 53 KOs).
Anthony Joshua, left, and Wladimir Klitschko will battle in front of 90,000 fans at Wembley Stadium.... [+] (Photo by Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images)
Heading into the fight, there are plenty of questions to be answered. Luckily, we’re finally about ready to get some answers, answers that could define the heavyweight division for the next half-decade. Forbes will be here throughout the fight, giving our round-by-round thoughts, explanations and unofficial scoring.
While you wait for the fight to begin, here’s all of the Forbes Joshua-Klitschko content from this week.
Wladimir Klitschko Will Beat Anthony Joshua: Here Are The Reasons Why Anthony Joshua Will Beat Wladimir Klitschko: Here Are The Reasons Why Anthony Joshua-Wladimir Klitschko Predictions: Experts, Boxers Make Their Picks This Week In Boxing Biz: Anthony Joshua-Wladimir Klitschko Fight Brings Showtime, HBO Together Joshua-Klitschko: The Ultimate Bettor's Guide Anthony Joshua vs. Wladimir Klitschko: Why Every Boxing Fan Should Be Rooting For AJ
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2583e8ae1b7b7c0ccce426abf8887158 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshkatzowitz/2017/04/29/boxing-biz-anthony-joshua-wladimir-klitschko-hbo-showtime/ | This Week In Boxing Biz: Anthony Joshua-Wladimir Klitschko Fight Brings Showtime, HBO Together | This Week In Boxing Biz: Anthony Joshua-Wladimir Klitschko Fight Brings Showtime, HBO Together
When Showtime won the right to live-broadcast Saturday’s Anthony Joshua-Wladimir Klitschko fight, it allowed the premium cable channel to take the lead in showcasing the biggest heavyweight fight in years. But it also allowed the boxing public in general to have full coverage of the fight, because the negotiations also won HBO the rights to broadcast the fight on a tape-delayed basis at 11 p.m. ET.
If any network won a possible viewership edge in showing the fight, it’s Showtime. Even though HBO’s subscriber base is larger, it will have a disadvantage broadcasting the fight six hours later, especially in today’s world of immediate social media spoilers and illegal livestreams. HBO will get the live rights if there is a Joshua-Klitschko rematch, but for Showtime, the Joshua-Klitschko event is more than just about fight night. It’s about the future of the heavyweight division and how it’s presented on U.S. TV.
“Our strategy regardless of weight class is to focus on those divisions that have the deepest talent and the most compelling boxers,” Showtime general manager Stephen Espinoza told Forbes. “There’s no secret that there’s a special prestige to the heavyweight division, that it’s always been the division that’s generated the most awareness in the general sports market. In order to make that division viable or any division, it takes more than one star fighter. You need a core group of talented, interesting boxers to make a series of good fights. That’s what generates attention and elevates the sport. It’s an 18-month to two-year process, minimum.”
Showtime has been utilizing heavyweight belt-holder Deontay Wilder for the past few years, and last year, it signed an exclusive American TV deal with Joshua. Undefeated heavyweight Luis Ortiz’s recent defection to Al Haymon and the Premier Boxing Champions promotion also bodes well for Showtime since the channel works so closely with PBC.
And if Showtime can eventually put together a matchup featuring Joshua-Wilder, Wilder-Ortiz, or Joshua-Ortiz, that would likely score massive viewership for the network. As for landing the live rights to Joshua-Klitschko, that was Showtime’s main goal when it began negotiating with HBO and Matchroom Boxing, Joshua’s promoter.
Anthony Joshua, left, and Wladimir Klitschko will be shown on HBO and Showtime. (Photo by Adrian... [+] Dennis/AFP/Getty Images)
“The live rights have been proven to be especially valuable in this very cluttered TV market,” Espinoza said. “But the reality is that it’s a massive worldwide event. It benefits both fighters and the sport in the long run to get the exposure on both premium networks. I’m sure the viewership is going to be healthy for both. I can make the case for the value of the nighttime replay. But for us, the priority was getting the live rights.”
The negotiations, though, weren’t easy. Both networks could have pulled the plug on anybody showing the fight in the U.S. since Showtime has an exclusive deal with Joshua and HBO has been entangled with Klitschko for years. But it sounds like Espinoza and HBO executive vice president Peter Nelson were more interested in making sure the fight was available in the U.S. than in sabotaging the negotiations.
“[It’s] a signal that the sport is moving in the right direction,” Nelson said in an email to Forbes. “We found common ground and figured out a solution."
When is Joshua coming to America?: It’s no surprise that Espinoza and Showtime want to bring Joshua to America at some point soon. A win vs. Klitschko could expedite that process. But then again, where else in the world but the U.K. will 90,000 fans jam into a stadium to watch Joshua fight?
That’s the conundrum with bringing Joshua to the U.S.
“He’s in an interesting position in terms of breaking into the U.S. market,” Espinoza said. “For most boxers, that means financial opportunity. For Anthony Joshua, coming to America, at least in the short run, is a financial sacrifice, because he is so popular in the U.K.”
Espinoza said Hearn has made it clear that fighting in the U.S. is a top priority for Joshua, and as for when Americans can expect to watch him fight locally, Espinoza said, “I don’t think it’ll be very long.”
As for Joshua’s opinion …
“I’ve made sure I fought some Americans on my way up so we could get a buzz out there,” Joshua said this week on a teleconference. “But I think I have to come out there for a fight for sure that’s important. America is the mecca of boxing. If we can cross over into the States and keep the fan base in the U.K., I think we’ve cracked it. That’s mega stuff, that’s global boxing. You’ve got a big guy, heavyweight with a name that’s easy to pronounce and speaks English well. I can relate to the U.S. market. All I have to do is get out there and show them what my trade is and hopefully they’ll appreciate it and hopefully we can start talking about setting up major fights and bringing the same attention in the U.K. to the U.S. That would be phenomenal.”
Shawn Porter punches Andre Berto en route to knocking him out last Saturday. (Photo by Al... [+] Bello/Getty Images)
Shawn Porter-Andre Berto ratings: Shawn Porter knocked out Andre Berto last week in a fight between two welterweights who both were in need of a victory.
But huge ratings for two NBA playoff games on the same evening put a damper on Showtime’s viewership, as the bout attracted just 468,000 viewers, well below the 779,000 average viewership that tuned in to watch the Adrien Broner-Adrian Granados fight in February.
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81e15abdd448ad7ea9a7680845be45f2 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshkatzowitz/2017/06/14/andre-ward-sergey-kovalev-ii-predictions-boxers-make-their-picks/ | Andre Ward-Sergey Kovalev II Predictions: Boxers Make Their Picks | Andre Ward-Sergey Kovalev II Predictions: Boxers Make Their Picks
You might think it’d be relatively easy to find boxers who are picking Sergey Kovalev to beat Andre Ward when they fight their rematch on Saturday night in Las Vegas on HBO PPV. But you’d be entirely wrong. Which, at first glance, might seem strange, considering many believed Kovalev won the first time they fought last November (including me, who had Kovalev edging out Ward 114-113) and considering Kovalev had Ward in major trouble of being stopped in the early part of the bout.
Sergey Kovalev, left, narrowly lost a decision to Andre Ward in November. (Photo by Al Bello/Getty... [+] Images)
And yes, the betting odds are still very close (Ward is a -155 favorite, meaning you’d have to wager $155 to win $100, and Kovalev is at +125, meaning you’d win $125 if you bet $100).
Adonis Stevenson, who just destroyed Andrzej Fonfara earlier this month and who said he wants the Ward-Kovalev winner, sees the fight this way.
“I think it’s 50-50,” Stevenson told Boxing Scene. “But if it goes 12 rounds, it will be a close decision and Andre Ward is going to win the fight. If it don’t go the distance, Kovalev has power. But in a fight like that, you never know. There can be a head-butt or something. You never know what can happen.”
In truth, not many believe Kovalev (30-1-1, 26 KOs) will win the second time around, even though these boxers have different reasons for picking Ward (31-0, 15 KOs), who made a guaranteed $5 million the last time these two fought (Kovalev walked away with $2 million).
That said, here are some predictions from those fighters and experts who know these boxers better than most anybody else.
Gary Russell Jr.: Like so many others, Russell, who is coming off a strong win vs. Oscar Escandon in a Showtime main event, scored the first fight for Kovalev. Russell, though, said he was glad Ward got the decision that time, and he thinks Ward will prevail in the rematch. “Hopefully, Ward went back to the drawing board and sees the mistakes he made,” Russell told Forbes. “He was too respectful of Kovalev. But his team will work out the kinks in his armor and make the necessary adjustments.”
Sergey Kovalev works out with trainer John David Jackson to prepare for Andre Ward. (Photo by Josh... [+] Lefkowitz/Getty Images)
Badou Jack: The man who last drew with James DeGale in January at super middleweight before announcing he’d move up to light heavyweight wants the winner. And like Russell, he had Kovalev eking out the first bout. Jack believes the same result could happen again. But he’s not picking Kovalev, either. “The first fight was very close. I had it six rounds each with the extra point for the knockdown [for Kovalev],” Badou told Fighthype.com. “I think Andre Ward can make adjustments. … I slightly favor him to win, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Kovalev.”
Andre Berto: Coming off a disappointing knockout loss to Shawn Porter in April, Berto thinks Ward and Kovalev are “hungry and motivated” with plenty left to prove. But he also looks at Ward and sees a confident fighter at his peak. That’s why he doesn’t think his friend will simply beat Kovalev. He thinks Ward will stop Kovalev. “Andre is getting mentally ready for what he wants to do, and this is the reason why he wants to do it,” Berto told FightHub. “He sees something. He feels something in that first fight that he believes that he’s going to be able to expose.”
Andre Ward is a slight betting favorite vs. Sergey Kovalev. (Photo by Alexis Cuarezma/Getty Images)
Gary Antuanne Russell: The 2016 Olympian made his pro debut with a first-round knockout win last month, and like his brother, he sees Ward winning a tough fight. “I most certainly know that Ward has learned from the first fight,” Gary Antuanne Russell told Forbes. “I think he had jitters that first fight. Now that it’s out of the way, he’s looking to go to war with Kovalev – intelligently. He knows how to find his distance, how to apply his pressure, the ins and outs of his craft. Kovalev will be mad that they robbed him and he’s going to try to come out and wail on him. That’s the immature thing to do. Andre Ward is an intelligent fighter. He’s going to capitalize on that.”
Kell Brook: Lo and behold, we’ve finally found somebody who doesn’t think Ward will grab the victory. “I favor Kovalev to win. I think he won the first time,” Brook said, via Boxing News 24. “I’m picking him again. That’s a good fight.”
Carl Frampton: In a column for the Belfast Telegraph, the former featherweight titlist also believed Kovalev won in November but that he won’t do so again. “It should be another close affair second time around and I think Ward will nick it again,” Frampton wrote. “I expect Ward to have learned from the first fight and use his super skills to box his way to a points decision.”
Eddie Mustafa Muhammad: The former light heavyweight titlist is leaning toward Ward, because the winner of the first fight oftentimes wins the rematch in even more dominant fashion. “If I beat you one time, I’ll beat you again, and I’ll make it more decisive,” Muhammad told the Mayweather Boxing Channel. “I’m going with the best fighter in the world today: Andre Ward.”
Compubox: Though the Compubox numbers were close in the last fight and though some actually favored Kovalev, the people who count the punches thrown and the punches landed have a clear-cut favorite for the rematch. “The bitter feelings from the first fight will probably not carry over into the ring because both men are cerebral fighters,” wrote Compubox, via HBO. “Ward has been this way throughout his career while Kovalev, once a free-swinging slugger, has diversified his game under trainer John David Jackson's tutelage. With 12 rounds against Kovalev under his belt and plenty of footage to analyze, Ward, who will now be given 12 fresh rounds to implement his findings, will carefully counter-punch and frustrate Kovalev en route to a wider win.”
Writer’s note: This article will be updated throughout the week.
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b7a905538b2e563d2e37f986ccfd99da | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshkatzowitz/2017/06/24/this-week-in-boxing-biz-anthony-joshua-wladimir-klitschko-ii-date-adrien-broner-weight-penalty/ | This Week In Boxing Biz: Possible Anthony Joshua-Wladimir Klitschko II Date, Broner Weight Penalty | This Week In Boxing Biz: Possible Anthony Joshua-Wladimir Klitschko II Date, Broner Weight Penalty
It’s been nearly two months since Anthony Joshua earned the biggest win of his career by knocking out Wladimir Klitschko in the 11th round, and yet, we still don’t know if the 40-year-old Klitschko will invoke his right to a rematch.
This was how Anthony Joshua (white shorts) reacted to knocking down Wladimir Klitschko (grey shorts)... [+] during their fight. (Photo by Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)
Predictions from boxing observers center around the idea he will eventually accept a second fight against Joshua—and why not, they both made £15 million in their first match—and if you take this tweet at face value, it’s easy to see why.
Leaving LND with a feeling everyone's win Sat night the sport, the fans and even I on respect. Cheers & I'll be back! pic.twitter.com/BgO04Csrrw — Klitschko (@Klitschko) May 2, 2017
But Tom Loeffler, Klitschko’s promoter, said this week that a decision has not been made.
“I really think it's 50-50,” Loeffler told Sky Sports. “Every time I talk to him, it's almost like he's torn both ways. We'll naturally support him either way he decides. If he decides to take the rematch, that's one the fans will look forward to.”
Klitschko was quite close to winning the fight. He had Joshua in massive trouble in the sixth round and nearly finished him.
If Klitschko decides he doesn’t want another fight vs. Joshua, the heavyweight titlist could turn to Kubrat Pulev, one of his mandatory opponents who was knocked out by Klitschko in 2014. Joshua has also floated the idea of facing either Tyson Fury (still the recognized heavyweight champion) or Deontay Wilder. And, for that matter, what about Andre Ward?
But Showtime GM Stephen Espinoza believes Klitschko will accept and told the Los Angeles Times that he could envision the fight occurring in November or December.
"We haven't heard from @Klitschko and its going on two months, but why wouldn't he [rematch]? He was 30 seconds, maybe less, from winning." — Lance Pugmire (@latimespugmire) June 20, 2017
But it’s not official until Klitschko says so.
“If he retires on that fight,” Loeffler said, “he had such a great run in the heavyweight division, there'll be no better way to go out.”
Broner’s penalty for missing weight: Adrien Broner has weighed in at the 140-pound junior welterweight limit only once since 2014, and there have been a few misses while trying to make that weight in the past few years (he was a pound over the limit vs. John Molina, and his team had to convince Adrian Granados to change their contract from a 140-pound fight to a 147-pound fight).
When he faces Mikey Garcia on July 29, Garcia and Broner have acknowledged there is a weight penalty, and Broner said he’d have to pay $500,000 if he weighs more than 140 pounds. But Broner said he’ll feel comfortable at 140.
“Check the record: 140 pounds and down, I’m an undefeated fighter,” Broner told FightHype. “ … Listen, don’t get me wrong, I’m very generous. But we’re not giving up half a mil.”
Deontay Wilder wants millions to fight Whyte: It’s clear Wilder doesn’t want to his fight his mandatory opponent, Bermane Stiverne, and it’s obvious why: Wilder easily won a unanimous decision against Stiverne in January 2015, and though Wilder made $1 million for that fight, there are other opponents where he could make far more.
And now that Matchroom Boxing promoter Eddie Hearn has suggested Dillian Whyte for Wilder, Wilder is looking to cash out.
On Instagram this week, Wilder addressed Hearn and wrote, “Make that offer of [$]3 million into [$]7 million,” and Wilder said they could talk about fighting. Whyte, who’s 20-1 with 15 KOs, is on a four-fight winning streak after getting knocked out by Joshua in December 2015.
This week in boxing history: If you’ve forgotten what kind of power former heavyweight champion Joe Louis had in his mid-20s, check out this old video of Louis destroying Johnny Paychek in 1940, via the Boxing History Twitter account.
In 1940, heavyweight champion Joe Louis completely annihilated Johnny Paycheck in 2 rounds to defend the title #boxing #history #knockout pic.twitter.com/RbY5qmppp6 — Boxing History (@BoxingHistory) January 7, 2017
That was a devastating knockout in front of more than 11,000 fans at Madison Square Garden, which brought in a gate of $62,481. Paychek, who was 25 at the time, wanted another shot at Louis.
“I would like to meet him again,” Paychek said, via the Afro American. “I think I could do better.”
Less than a year later, after two more losses to journeymen, Paychek retired.
For his part in the Louis fight, Paychek, according to the Reno Gazette-Journal was supposed to make 20% of the gate, which would have given him about $12,500, while Louis was scheduled to earn 40% (about $25,000).
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9d63ac78035a27cdb1b5eebfe06cabed | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshkatzowitz/2018/01/10/boxing-pound-for-pound-moneymakers-canelo-alvarez-vasyl-lomachenko/ | Boxing's Pound-For-Pound Moneymakers: Canelo Alvarez Still Reigns, Vasyl Lomachenko Rises | Boxing's Pound-For-Pound Moneymakers: Canelo Alvarez Still Reigns, Vasyl Lomachenko Rises
Last year was one of the best 12 months boxing has had in quite some time. The best in the world faced each other (Canelo Alvarez vs. Gennady Golovkin and Anthony Joshua vs. Wladimir Klitschko, for example), some of the richest fighters in the sport said goodbye, and a new crop of stars continued to develop into possible future moneymakers. The last two months of the 2017 were informative as well, as Vasyl Lomchenko thoroughly dominated Guillermo Rigondeaux while Sergey Kovalev and Daniel Jacobs proved that, despite recent losses, they still deserve to be on this list.
Canelo Alvarez, left, drew with Gennady Golovkin in September to keep his No. 1 spot on tihs list.... [+] (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
The first two months of 2018 should also give fighters room to maneuver on the Pound-For-Pound Moneymakers list. Errol Spence Jr. will face Lamont Peterson in what could be Spence’s toughest opponent—of course, the last time we wrote that about a Spence opponent, he dominated Kell Brook to win a welterweight title—and Mikey Garcia challenges Sergey Lipinets for his junior welterweight belt. Meanwhile, super flyweight Srisaket Sor Rungvisai and junior lightweight Miguel Berchelt, two men who are 2018 Future Moneymakers, are in action in February.
As a reminder, here’s who we would rank if this list were a regular pound-for-pound list.
1. Vasyl Lomachenko
2. Terence Crawford
3. Gennady Golovkin
4. Canelo Alvarez
5. Sergey Kovalev
6. Keith Thurman
7. Naoya Inoue
8. Errol Spence
9. Mikey Garcia
10. Anthony Joshua
But just because you’re the best boxer, that doesn’t mean you’re the best box-office draw. This month, we must say a fond farewell to Miguel Cotto. The final two paydays of his career were a pair of $750,000 purses, but he earned some of the most money of his era. In his prime, he earned $8 million in a loss to Floyd Mayweather, made a guaranteed $7 million when he beat Sergio Martinez for the middleweight championship, and gathered a career-best $15 million when he lost that championship to Canelo Alvarez. Cotto retires with plenty of money in the bank and has a future spot in the Boxing Hall of Fame. That’s a pretty good way to end a career.
With that said, here are the sport’s Top 15 Pound-For-Pound Moneymakers (here’s how we ranked them in November).
Note: These rankings, which are published every other month, are based on past fight purses, potential future bouts and opponents, and where they currently stand in boxing's pecking order.
1. Canelo Alvarez (previously No. 1): Still the biggest PPV star on the planet, he’s earning a guaranteed $5 million for each fight he takes, and his two PPV fights combined in 2017 compelled more than 2.3 million to spend their money to watch him. Here's hoping he agrees to a rematch with Golovkin for May.
2. Anthony Joshua (previously No. 2): After earning a combined £25 million for his last two fights, Joshua likely will face fellow heavyweight titlist Joseph Parker in March. Assuming he beats Parker, Joshua would hold three heavyweight titles, giving him plenty of leverage to be the A-side in a potential huge-money fight vs. Deontay Wilder.
3. Gennady Golovkin (previously No. 3): Though he’s perhaps the best middleweight in the world, he still needs Alvarez for a huge payday. If the judges had given him the win vs. Alvarez, like many thought he deserved (including me), instead of awarding a draw, Golovkin would hold plenty of leverage in a rematch. Instead, Golovkin is forced to wait for Alvarez to agree to a second bout.
Vasily Lomachenko thoroughly dominated Guillermo Rigondeaux last month. (Photo by Steven Ryan/Getty... [+] Images)
4. Vasyl Lomachenko (previously No. 5): Not only did he dominate Guillermo Rigondeaux and force him to quit last month, Lomachenko made a hefty $1.2 million purse and drew an average of 1.73 million views to ESPN. It might be a while before Lomachenko gets another big-time fight, but he’s most certainly now a big-money boxer.
5. Terence Crawford (previously No. 4): After cleaning out the junior welterweight division by unifying all four titles with a knockout of Julius Indongo in August, Crawford likely will face Jeff Horn for his welterweight title. With a win there, Crawford would become a big player in the very deep 147-pound division.
6. Errol Spence (previously No. 6): Fans would like to see Spence fight more often—he fought twice in 2016 and only once last year—but when he does, he proves he’s an immense talent. He’ll face Lamont Peterson this month in one of the biggest challenges of Spence’s career.
7. Daniel Jacobs (previously No. 8): Coming off his loss last March to Golovkin, Jacobs returned to the ring in November with a new promoter in Matchroom Boxing, a new HBO contract, and a win vs. Luis Arias. He’s got plenty of potential fights in the middleweight division, and all of them (Alvarez, Golovkin, or Billy Joe Saunders) could make him plenty of money.
8. Deontay Wilder (previously No. 7): Though he keeps missing out on big-time paydays because his opponents keep failing drug tests (Alexander Povetkin, Luis Ortiz), Wilder is slated to fight Ortiz in March. Then, even though he’ll be the B-side of the promotion, he’ll hopefully meet Joshua in a heavyweight mega-fight.
9. Sergey Kovalev (previously No. 11): Returning from back-to-back defeats against Andre Ward, Kovalev scored a powerful knockout against Vyacheslav Shabranskyy and earned solid ratings for HBO (an average of 869,000 viewers with a peak of 900,000—the third-highest show of the year on the network). Next, he’ll be back in an HBO main event vs. Igor Mikhalkin in March to continue building his return as the man to beat in the light heavyweight division.
10. Keith Thurman (previously No. 10): Though it’s not his fault, Keith Thurman hasn’t capitalized on the fact he and Danny Garcia fought the most-viewed battle of 2017 (an average of 3.71 million and a peak of 5.1 million watched their February fight on CBS). Thurman has been out with an injury ever since, and we’re still waiting to hear his next move.
11. Mikey Garcia (previously No. 12): It’s disappointing that Garcia hasn’t shown much interest in fighting Jorge Linares to unify lightweight titles (he reportedly turned down a 50-50 split vs. Linares, and he reportedly blew off a $2 million offer to fight Miguel Cotto in his final fight). Instead, Garcia will try to win a junior welterweight belt from the undefeated Sergey Lipinets next month.
12. Manny Pacquaio (previously No. 9): We don’t know for sure whether Pacquiao will continue to fight. We do know that if he decides to return, he’ll command millions of dollars.
13. Jermell Charlo (previously No. 14): One of the most surprising moments in the sport last year occurred in October when Charlo knocked out Erickson Lubin in the first round.
For that, the junior middleweight beltholder made $450,000. Since then, he’s called out Sadam Ali for a unification title bout.
14. Jermall Charlo (previously No. 13): As Charlo, now a middleweight, waits for the large paydays that potentially await against fighters like Gennady Golovkin, Canelo Alvarez and Daniel Jacobs, he’s likely to fight Huge Centano next. Charlo only fought once in 2017 for a $350,000 purse. Here’s hoping he’s more active in 2018.
15. Srisaket Sor Rungvisai (previously unranked): He became the face of the superfly division this year, beating former No. 1 pound-for-pound fighter Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez twice. Next, he fights in the main event of HBO’s Superfly II card vs. Juan Francisco Estrada, and a win there gets him closer to the kind of money Chocolatito used to make (a $600,000 purse in his last fight).
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3f78f2b088e6e7d5951d06ae0be7f271 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshkatzowitz/2019/05/05/canelo-alvarez-vs-daniel-jacobs-artur-beterbiev-video-highlights-weekend-fight-reviews/ | Canelo Alvarez Vs. Daniel Jacobs, Artur Beterbiev, Video Highlights, Weekend Fight Reviews | Canelo Alvarez Vs. Daniel Jacobs, Artur Beterbiev, Video Highlights, Weekend Fight Reviews
Canelo Alvarez, left, slipped by Daniel Jacobs in a close unanimous decision win. (AP Photo/John... [+] Locher)
Canelo Alvarez and Danny Jacobs put out solid performances in a solid fight. Artur Beterbiev ended the evening early while defending his light heavyweight title. And Sadam Ali got knocked out again.
But let’s go a little deeper, and let’s watch (or rewatch) some of the tape. Here’s everything you might have missed in boxing this weekend.
Notable weekend fights:
--Another close middleweight fight went Canelo Alvarez’s (51-1-2, 35 KOs) way on Saturday night. But with the way Alvarez fought the last two rounds vs. Daniel Jacobs (35-2, 29), it’s tough to say that he didn’t deserve to win the bout. The judges had it 115-113, 115-113, 116-112 for Alvarez (I had it 115-113) by unanimous decision, and the result allowed Alvarez to defend his two middleweight belts and to take the title held by Jacobs. After a draw and a close win vs. Gennady Golovkin (I thought Golovkin won both bouts), Alvarez legitimately won a close fight against one of the best 160-pounders in the world. And it will be difficult for any critics to argue that Alvarez lost the fight.
Alvarez did great body work in the early rounds, and at times, his defense was sublime. But Jacobs came on in the middle to late rounds (he landed a ridiculous left hook in the ninth that somehow Alvarez took without a problem) to tighten the scorecards. But in the final two rounds, Alvarez—who made a $35 million payday vs. Jacobs’ guaranteed $10 million purse*—rejuvenated himself and put just a little bit of distance between himself and Jacobs.
*Jacobs reportedly will have to pay about a $1 million fine for coming in much heavier than the contracted re-hydration weight of 170 pounds on the morning of the fight.
Now, Alvarez could face either Golovkin for a third time or could meet Demetrius Andrade for the chance to unify all four belts in the middleweight division. After the fight, Alvarez was noncommittal about what exactly what he wanted to do.
--Artur Beterbiev (14-0, 14 KOs) kept his perfect record intact on Saturday, stopping Radivoje Kalajdzic (24-2) in the fifth round to defend his light heavyweight title. Hopefully, boxing fans, at some point, can get a unification fight between Beterbiev and Sergey Kovalev, Dmitry Bivol or Oleksandr Gvozdyk. Any one of those matchups would be awesome.
Two warriors going back and forth on the ropes! #BeterbievHotRod pic.twitter.com/1fCwYSGucx — Top Rank Boxing (@trboxing) May 5, 2019
The ref stops the fight after @ABeterbiev proves to be too much for Kalajdzic. The world champ retains his belt with a TKO victory!!#BeterbievHotRod pic.twitter.com/oos50omeHq — Top Rank Boxing (@trboxing) May 5, 2019
--Perhaps Sadam Ali (27-3) is still feeling the effects of getting absolutely dominated and then brutally knocked out by Jaime Munguia 12 months ago. That could be one explanation for what happened Saturday—or it could be that the massive underdog Anthony Young (21-2, 8 KOs) is simply better than most people knew. But Young, who’d never fought anybody close to the caliber of Ali, engaged in a fun fight that ended when Young stopped Ali in the third round. Ali’s $150,000 purse was more than three times what Young earned, but that obviously didn’t matter on fight night. For Ali, who beat Miguel Cotto in December 2017, the downfall has been swift for the 30-year-old former welterweight titlist.
WE HAVE AN UPSET! 13-1 Underdog Anthony Young Stops Former World Champion Sadam Ali! pic.twitter.com/zrruCJkVZq — DAZN USA (@DAZN_USA) May 5, 2019
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33266cf24a7ca19568c549dc24775a7c | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshkatzowitz/2019/11/04/boxing-pound-for-pound-list-canelo-alvarez/ | Boxing Pound-For-Pound List: Canelo Alvarez Moves Up To No. 2 After Exhilarating KO Of Sergey Kovalev | Boxing Pound-For-Pound List: Canelo Alvarez Moves Up To No. 2 After Exhilarating KO Of Sergey Kovalev
Canelo Alvarez, right, blasted out Sergey Kovalev, and now many think he's the best fighter in the ... [+] world. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images) Getty Images
After his devastating knockout victory against Sergey Kovalev on Saturday, procuring for himself a light heavyweight title, Canelo Alvarez has moved up in my boxing pound for pound list and overtaken Terence Crawford. That’s how impressive Alvarez was in dispatching the longtime light heavyweight star as Alvarez, the middleweight champion, made his 175-pound debut.
In my latest pound for pound list, I had Alvarez at No. 3, only behind Vasiliy Lomachenko and Terence Crawford. But after Alvarez broke down and knocked out Kovalev on Saturday night, I’m moving him up to No. 2. Here’s my newest list.
1.Vasiliy Lomachenko
2. Canelo Alvarez
3. Terence Crawford
4. Errol Spence
5. Nayoa Inoue
6. Gennadiy Golovkin
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7. Oleksandr Usyk
8. Mikey Garcia
9. Juan Francisco Estrada
10. Artur Beterbiev
The reason I made the switch is because Alvarez showed huge success in yet another weight division and because the ending of that fight was so powerful, both literally and figuratively.
Crawford, meanwhile, has been stuck without a major fight. That’s because he’s promoted by Top Rank, and just about every other meaningful welterweight is affiliated with Premier Boxing Champions. Through no fault of his own, Crawford can’t make fights with boxers like Errol Spence, Keith Thurman, Shawn Porter or Manny Pacquiao because they’re all with PBC and because PBC is seemingly uninterested in striking a deal with Top Rank.
Crawford is scheduled to fight his title mandatory vs. the relatively unknown Egidijus Kavaliauskas in December, and he’ll probably look great in destroying his challenger. But Alvarez’s resume is so superior and his recent run of fights is so good—beating Golovkin in their middleweight championship rematch, moving up to 168 pounds to dominate Rocky Fielding, returning to 160 pounds to solidly beat Daniel Jacobs and then moving up two weight classes to pound Kovalev, once one of the most feared man in the entire sport—it’d be impossible in my mind to ignore that and keep him at No. 3 on my list.
In the most recent Boxing Writers Association of America pound for pound list, which was released late last month, Alvarez was third with 122 points, behind Lomachenko (145 points) and Crawford (131). The Ring magazine also places Alvarez No. 3 at the moment.
Others, though, said on Twitter that it wouldn’t be inappropriate to place Alvarez on the very top of the list, proclaiming him the best fighter in the world.
So, what’s next for Alvarez? He could move back down to middleweight to face Golovkin. He could meet super middleweight champion Callum Smith. Or he could stay at 175 pounds to match up with the new king of the division, Artur Beterbiev. If he could win vs. Beterbiev, who I voted for at No. 10 after he unified titles by stopping Oleksandr Gvozdyk last month, there’s a good chance I’d reconsider and put Alvarez at No. 1.
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8e172dbef3ace3774735e83c757c83c7 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshkatzowitz/2020/12/23/jake-paul-vs-ben-askren-odds-the-youtube-star-is-somehow-the-betting-favorite-against-the-professional-fighter/?sh=16e1d4f97355 | Jake Paul Vs. Ben Askren Odds: The YouTube Star Is Somehow The Betting Favorite Against The Professional Fighter (Updated) | Jake Paul Vs. Ben Askren Odds: The YouTube Star Is Somehow The Betting Favorite Against The Professional Fighter (Updated)
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - NOVEMBER 28: Jake Paul reacts over his knockout victory against Nate ... [+] Robinson in the second round during Mike Tyson vs Roy Jones Jr. presented by Triller at Staples Center on November 28, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Joe Scarnici/Getty Images for Triller) Getty Images for Triller
Ben Askren was a successful professional fighter. Jake Paul has won a couple of times against other boxing neophytes. But when the Jake Paul vs. Ben Askren odds were released by a few online sportsbooks on Wednesday, one showed that Paul, the YouTube star who is now undertaking a boxing career, would actually be the favorite if their rumored fight comes to fruition.
The two have been linked together in the past few days, and on Tuesday, Askren released a social media video saying he accepted Paul’s challenge and that the two could tangle on March 28 in Los Angeles.
On Jan. 26, Paul announced on Twitter that the fight was official for April 17.
“It’s a pretty simple choice,” said Askren, who started his MMA career with a 19-0 record but who lost his last two fights to Jorge Masvidal (in a UFC record five seconds) and Demian Maia before retiring in 2019. “I’m going to make a whole bunch of money to beat up a guy who is pretending to be an athlete. … Quite frankly, I’m impressed that you’ve deluded yourself into thinking that you’re actually a fighter … that beating up another YouTuber and beating up a boxer who have never been in the ring before makes you somehow good at boxing.”
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There’s little doubt that Paul has had success when he’s stepped into the ring, knocking out YouTuber Deji in a 2018 exhibition, stopping YouTuber AnEsonGib in the first round in January and then brutally knocking out former NBA star Nate Robinson earlier this month.
Perhaps that’s why Paul was the -180 favorite in the opening line from BetOnline.ag. That means you’d have to bet $180 to win $100. Meanwhile, Askren is a +150 underdog, meaning you’d earn a $150 payday if you wagered $100. After the fight was made official, the odds had widened to Paul at -220 and Askren at +180.
MyBookie.ag, though, tells a slightly different story. That sportsbook has made Askren the -150 favorite with Paul at +120.
SINGAPORE, SINGAPORE - OCTOBER 26: (R-L) Ben Askren punches Demian Maia of Brazil in their ... [+] welterweight bout during the UFC Fight Night event at Singapore Indoor Stadium on October 26, 2019 in Singapore. (Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images) Zuffa LLC via Getty Images
Here are some other prop bets from MyBookie.
Will Jake Paul be knocked down?
Yes -160 No +120
Will Ben Askren be knocked down?
Yes +155 No -220
Will the fight end in the KO or TKO
Yes -150 No +110
Jake Paul to win by KO or TKO
Yes +175 No -250
Ben Askren to win by KO or TKO
Yes -130 No +100
Jake Paul isn’t the only Paul brother to get strange odds for a potential upcoming fighter. Jake’s older brother, Logan Paul, started out as only a +1500 underdog against Floyd Mayweather, the greatest boxer of his generation. Mayweather’s opening money line, meanwhile, was -5000.
Since then, the odds have actually narrowed. As of late Wednesday night, Paul was +750 and Mayweather was -2000. Which means that, for some reason, plenty of people have put their money on Paul to somehow beat Mayweather in their February exhibition.
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3d9787542b6cffd97f6f5e1d9b740a39 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshkatzowitz/2021/04/01/jake-paul-vs-ben-askren-odds-update-the-money-lines-have-significantly-narrowed/ | Jake Paul Vs. Ben Askren Odds Update: The Money Lines Have Significantly Narrowed | Jake Paul Vs. Ben Askren Odds Update: The Money Lines Have Significantly Narrowed
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA - MARCH 26: Ben Askren (R) shoves Jake Paul as they face off during a news ... [+] conference for Triller Fight Club's inaugural 2021 boxing event at The Venetian Las Vegas on March 26, 2021 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Paul and Askren will face each other in the main event that will take place on April 17, 2021, at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images) Getty Images
When the Jake Paul vs. Ben Askren fight was first announced, it was a little surprising that Paul, the YouTube star, was a solid betting favorite over Askren, the former MMA standout. Now, that we’re less than three weeks away from the fight, those odds are beginning to tighten.
At one point, the money line on Paul was -220, and Askren was the +180 underdog. But as of this writing, BetOnline.ag has Paul at -125 (bet $125 to win $100) and Askren at -105 (bet $105 to win $100). While Paul was a 2/1 favorite in early February, it’s now basically a pick ‘em fight.
Which makes sense to me. Paul has scored impressive knockouts against AnEsonGib and Nate Robinson in his pro boxing career, but remember, that was against another YouTuber and a former professional basketball player. Paul had more experience in the ring than both of them.
While Askren isn’t a boxer—and was never known for his striking ability in MMA—he understands what it’s like to participate in a big-time fight. He also started his MMA career with 19-straight victories, so he’s certainly not a neophyte in combat sports.
As Askren said when the fight was announced, “I’m going to make a whole bunch of money to beat up a guy who is pretending to be an athlete. … Quite frankly, I’m impressed that you’ve deluded yourself into thinking that you’re actually a fighter … that beating up another YouTuber and beating up a boxer who have never been in the ring before makes you somehow good at boxing.”
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According to OddsChecker, the oddsmakers might have erred in making Paul an early favorite, and in one 24-hour period this week, 64.5% of the bets that had been placed on this fight were for Askren.
“This has gotten out of control, but thankfully oddsmakers and bettors are coming to their sense,” OddsChecker spokesman Kyle Newman said in a statement. “Askren is a former Bellator and ONE welterweight champion. He has a career record of 19-2. Did he struggle against UFC fighters? Yes he did, but Paul isn’t a UFC fighter. Jake Paul is a former YouTuber who knocked out a former NBA player. These things aren’t equivalent. Honestly, it’d be quite the shock to see Paul last more than a round with a professional fighter, even if he’s a trained wrestler and not a boxer.”
At least one MMA fighter disagrees, though.
“Ben Askren hasn’t been the best striker in mixed martial arts,” featherweight Demetrious Johnson told MMA Fighting. “Do I think he’ll be the best striker in boxing? I would say I don’t think it’s gonna happen. … Yes, I know Jake Paul is a YouTube star. He’s training just as hard as a world champion is. He has unlimited access to the best trainers in the world. He has the funding, not saying Ben Askren doesn’t but anytime you fight somebody who has training, there’s always that chance. I’m not discounting Ben Askren out of this fight.
“But if somebody came to me and said, ‘Demetrious Johnson, here’s $1 million, who are you putting the money on? … If you don’t bet, I’m taking the $1 million with me’ … I’m throwing it on Jake Paul. I think he’s gonna win the fight.”
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f9e8e2b302e45128e438033e7995ff23 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshkatzowitz/2021/04/02/jamel-herring-vs-carl-frampton-odds-records-prediction/ | Jamel Herring Vs. Carl Frampton: Odds, Records, Prediction (Updated With Betting Results) | Jamel Herring Vs. Carl Frampton: Odds, Records, Prediction (Updated With Betting Results)
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA - SEPTEMBER 05: In this handout image provided by Top Rank, Jamel Herring fights ... [+] Jonathan Oquendo during a Jr. Lightweight WBO World Title bout at MGM Grand Conference Center Grand Ballroom on September 05, 2020 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Mikey Williams/Top Rank via Getty Images) Top Rank via Getty Images
Jamel Herring is coming off a so-so performance in his last 130-pound title defense, but a win against Carl Frampton on Saturday would provide him the best win of his career. Frampton is coming of a so-so performance in his last junior lightweight bout, but a win against Herring would rejuvenate his career and make him the first Irish fighter to capture world titles in three different weight divisions. So, there’s plenty on the line in the Jamel Herring vs. Carl Frampton clash. Here’s everything you need to know about the fight, including the odds, their records and a prediction on who will win.
Frampton has talked publicly about walking away from the sport if he can’t beat Herring on Saturday. Conventional wisdom states that when a fighter starts musing about retirement in this manner, he’s already halfway out the door. So, that might not be a great sign if you’re rooting for the Irishman.
“I will retire if I lose this fight, because I want to be involved in big fights,” Frampton said this week. “After the [Josh] Warrington defeat I made a promise to my wife and kids that I believed I could win a world title again. That’s what I wanted to do. That’s [what] I believed I could achieve. The reason I carried on after the Warrington fight is because I believed I could do it.
“If I lose to Jamel Herring, I don’t want to have to go around the houses to get into a position to fight another champion again and be in this game for three years waiting on a fight. To be honest, I can’t speak for Jamel, but I think whoever loses this fight probably retires. We’re not the youngest guys in the world, anymore. It’s just me being honest.”
It seems unlikely that the 35-year-old Herring would agree that he needs to retire if he loses. Instead, he’d rather just visit Frampton in Ireland after he scores the win.
"We've prepared for the best version of Carl, and with everything that he has done in his career, he will be the biggest name on my resume,” Herring said. “I've been invited to Belfast many times, so maybe down the road me and him can get that pint.”
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Here’s more info on the Jamel Herring vs. Carl Frampton showdown that U.S. viewers can watch on ESPN+ beginning at 4 p.m. ET.
MANCHESTER, ENGLAND - DECEMBER 22: Carl Frampton punches Josh Warrington during the IBF World ... [+] Featherweight Championship title fight between Josh Warrington and Carl Frampton at Manchester Arena on December 22, 2018 in Manchester, England. (Photo by Alex Livesey/Getty Images) Getty Images
Jamel Herring vs. Carl Frampton odds
As of Friday afternoon, this is a pick ‘em fight, as both Herring and Frampton are -120, meaning you’d have to wager $120 to win $100. The money this week, though, has come in on Herring. Originally, Frampton was a -150 betting favorite, while Herring was a +100 underdog. Steadily, though, bettors have tended to favor Herring on Bet 365. On Sports Betting Dime, Frampton, at -120, is the slightest of favorites against the -110 of Herring.
“I’m surprised by that, if I’m being honest,” Frampton said on DAZN’s The Ak & Barak Show. “Obviously, just the size of Jamel, he’s the champion and everything else. And I thought the bookies probably would’ve had him a favorite. But I don’t really pay attention to what the bookies have. I know that because someone’s told me that I was the slight favorite. But I would be going into this fight feeling that I’m probably the underdog.”
I like Herring as a fighter, and though I don’t think he’s one of the absolute best at 130 pounds (I’d make him a significant underdog vs. Oscar Valdez, Miguel Berchelt and Gervonta Davis), he’s good enough (and big enough) to get by Frampton. Unless Frampton has that resurgence he’s hoping to find. Still, I’d wager on Herring to win by decision at +162.
If you were looking for a fun parlay for this weekend’s action of boxing (and this is only my opinion and not a recommendation), I might take Herring by decision at +162, Murodjon Akhmadaliev to win by KO/TKO vs. Ryosuke Iwasa at -200, and Donnie Nietes to win vs. Pablo Carrillo at -900. All of that would pay you $337 on a $100 wager.
UPDATE: Well, I thought Herring would win. I didn’t think he would dominate Frampton like he did and then knock him out in the sixth to retain his 130-pound belt. That TKO ruined the hypothetical parlay we wrote about, but man, Herring looked great. After the loss, Frampton confirmed he would retire. “I jut want to go home and to my beautiful wife and kids,” he said. “That’s it. Just dedicate my life to them.”
As for the other fights we wrote about, Akhmadaliev looked strong in stopping Iwasa in the fifth. The ref stopped the fight a little early, but there didn’t seem to be much question that he would beat Iwasa and defend his unified junior featherweight belts. Nietes, meanwhile, easily beat Carrillo by unanimous decision.
Jamel Herring vs. Carl Frampton records
Herring has faced solid opponents in his career and has built a 22-2, 10 KOs record. Since losing to Ladarius Miller in 2017, Herring has won six straight, including his best win against the then-undefeated Lamont Roach. At the age of 34, Frampton is on the backside of his career (though the older Herring still seems more in his prime than Frampton does). But he’d still represent a big milestone for Herring if the titlist can keep his belt.
Frampton (28-2, 16 KOs) was the BWAA Fighter of the Year in 2016 after he beat Scott Quigg and Leo Santa Cruz in back-to-back fights. Though Santa Cruz won their rematch, Frampton also scored a huge victory against Nonito Donaire in 2018. Despite his loss to Josh Warrington later that year, Frampton has done his best work at junior featherweight and featherweight. Since moving to lightweight, he’s looked rather ordinary, and against Herring, “rather ordinary” isn’t going to cut it.
Jamel Herring vs. Carl Frampton prediction
Herring didn’t look great in his last fight and then caught flak for winning by disqualification. But he’s a better fighter than that, and he’ll show it vs. Frampton. In Frampton’s prime, he almost certainly would have beaten Herring. But he’s a few years past that. Frampton will turn in a solid performance on Saturday, but in the end, he won’t have enough to upend Herring. Call it Herring by majority decision.
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60285d292463775e8925465f310cae31 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshkatzowitz/2021/04/10/jaron-boots-ennis-vs-sergey-lipinets-odds-records-prediction/ | Jaron ‘Boots’ Ennis Vs. Sergey Lipinets: Odds, Records, Prediction | Jaron ‘Boots’ Ennis Vs. Sergey Lipinets: Odds, Records, Prediction
ATLANTIC CITY, NJ - JANUARY 10: Bakhtiyar Eyubov lands a left hand against Jaron Ennis during their ... [+] fight on January 10, 2020 at Ocean Casino Resort in Atlantic City, New Jersey. (Photo by Edward Diller/Getty Images) Getty Images
Jaron “Boots” Ennis is one of the best young fighters in boxing, and on Saturday, he’ll step in against the best opponent of his career. The problem, as Ennis sees it, is that, so far, he hasn’t necessarily gotten credit for the strength of his opponents. Beat them handily, and all of sudden, they weren’t so great after all. Perhaps a victory vs. Sergey Lipinets will help change that thinking. So, here’s everything you need to know about Jaron “Boots” Ennis vs. Sergey Lipinets, including the odds, their records and a prediction on who will win.
“Every time I fight, they always say it’s a step-up,” Ennis said. “And then when I do what I do, they say I need to fight somebody better. … Beating Lipinets would take my career to the next level because he’s a former world champion at 140 pounds and he fought a lot of top guys.
“Making a statement against him is definitely a whole different level, and it would boost me all the way up the rankings. I feel like after this fight, it’s on to bigger and better things. But we have business to handle on April 10 first.”
Lipinets certainly could be a tough customer for Ennis. Especially since he won a 140-pound title in 2017, proving that he’s on the world-class level. Or that he was at one point, anyway, when he was seven pounds lighter. Ennis hasn’t yet proved that he can beat that type of opponent.
“We’ve watched Ennis’ fights and this is a guy who’s not going to shy away or just stay on the outside,” Lipinets said. “He’s going to come to fight and that appealed to me. That’s what I like and I’m looking forward to it. Ultimately, we all want those world titles. This is the kind of fight where the winner can’t be denied anymore. Ennis is not a boogeyman, he’s another fighter with two hands and two feet.”
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Here’s more info on the Jaron “Boots” Ennis vs. Sergey Lipinets showdown that U.S. viewers can watch on Showtime beginning at 9 p.m. ET.
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA - JULY 20: Referee Jay Nady (R) moves in after Sergey Lipinets (L) knocked out ... [+] Jayar Inson in the second round of their welterweight bout at MGM Grand Garden Arena on July 20, 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images) Getty Images
Jaron “Boots” Ennis vs. Sergey Lipinets odds
When the original money lines came out on Bovada this week, I thought they were too wide. They’ve only gotten wider as we draw closer to the fight. As of Friday, Ennis was a -1600 betting favorite, meaning you’d have to bet $1,600 to win $100. Meanwhile, Lipinets is a +800 underdog, which means you’d earn an $800 payday with a $100 wager. Earlier in the week, Ennis was -1100 and Lipinets was +600, so despite the original wide odds, people are still betting on Ennis.
If you think Lipinets can pull the upset, all of this is great news. But if you’re looking to get value on Ennis, you could go with Ennis by KO/TKO at -305 (which, to me, still isn’t all that great) or you could bet on him to win by stoppage in rounds 4-6 at +240. But in reality, it might be better to skip wagering on this fight in general. I’m just not sure there’s a great value anywhere.
If you were looking for a fun parlay for this weekend’s action of boxing (and this is only my opinion and not a recommendation), I might take Ennis to stop Lipinets at -305, Joe Smith Jr. to beat Maxim Vlasov by stoppage at -110, and the over of 7.5 rounds in the Jerwin Ancajas vs. Jonathan Javier Rodriguez fight at -110. That would pay out $384 on a $100 wager.
Jaron “Boots” Ennis vs. Sergey Lipinets records
Despite a disappointing result in his last fight—he and Chris van Heerden fought to a no-decision after van Heerden suffered a cut from an accidental headbutt in the first round—Ennis has a fantastic record for a 23-year-old at 26-0 with 24 KOs. In 2019, Ennis probably had the best victory of his career when he stopped Juan Carlos Abreu in the sixth round.
Lipinets (16-1-1, 12 KOs) is the first former world titlist Ennis will have faced. But Lipinets has spent most of his career at junior welterweight, and Ennis is significantly taller with a much longer reach. He’s more of a natural welterweight than Lipinets. Lipinets’ only loss came to Mikey Garcia in 2018, but he a scored win vs. Leonardo Zappavigna and sent Lamont Peterson into retirement after stopping him in 2019.
Jaron “Boots” Ennis vs. Sergey Lipinets prediction
I don’t think Lipinets should be an 8/1 underdog. He’s too good for that. But I also don’t think he can beat Ennis. Ennis could be a burgeoning boxing star, and a stoppage win would set him well on his way. I think that’s exactly what will happen. Say, Ennis by stoppage in the fifth round.
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851e7528adb9e3841f4e44eabf2b58d3 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshkatzowitz/2021/04/10/joe-smith-jr-vs-maxim-vlasov-odds-records-prediction/ | Joe Smith Jr. Vs. Maxim Vlasov: Odds, Records, Prediction (Updated With Betting Results) | Joe Smith Jr. Vs. Maxim Vlasov: Odds, Records, Prediction (Updated With Betting Results)
CHICAGO, IL - JUNE 18: Joe Smith Jr. (red gloves) celebrates after defeating Andrezej Fonfara (not ... [+] pictured) during the WBC International Light Heavyweight Title bout at UIC Pavilion on June 18, 2016 in Chicago, Illinois. Joe Smith Jr. won by knock out in the first round. (Photo by Jon Durr/Getty Images) Getty Images
After a two-month delay because of Maxim Vlasov’s COVID-19 diagnosis, Joe Smith Jr. gets another chance to win a light heavyweight world title. For Smith, it couldn’t come at a better time. Said Smith simply, “I am extremely motivated after all I have been through in my career.” Here’s everything you need to know about Joe Smith Jr. vs. Maxim Vlasov, including the odds, their records and a prediction on who will win.
This fight was originally supposed to occur in February, but Vlasov was diagnosed with the coronavirus and had to bow out. The Russian said he’s fully recovered now, and maybe that’s true. But you have to remember that Alexander Povetkin was infected a couple months before his rematch against Dillian Whyte and then looked completely out of it when he actually stepped into the ring a few weeks ago.
Whether Vlasov is 100% now remains to be seen. But he knew that taking the fight with Smith in the first place was a danger.
“You have to take risks to win big fights,” Vlasov said, via Boxing Scene. “This is my big chance to become a world champion, to bring the title back home to Russia. I am excited and I am ready for this. I’ve waited a long time to [return to the ring] but even longer to become world champion. This is why I fight.”
Smith, though, is more established on the international boxing scene, and though he lost to Dmitry Bivol in his only title fight appearance in 2019, Smith has reeled off two nice victories in a row, beating Jesse Hart and then knocking out Eleider Alvarez. Vlasov said the Alvarez victory wasn’t all that impressive and said Smith was predictable and basic. But Smith’s power is a great equalizer in the 175-pound division.
“Joe Smith Jr. deserves this opportunity, and I know Maxim Vlasov will give him a great challenge,” said Top Rank chairman Bob Arum. “The light heavyweight division is one of the hottest in boxing, and the winner will have no shortage of lucrative opportunities.”
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After all, who wouldn’t want to see Smith take on the division’s best in Artur Beterbiev? That would be one of the best fights that can be made in the sport. First, though, he has to get past Vlasov.
Here’s more info on the Joe Smith Jr. vs. Maxim Vlasov showdown that U.S. viewers can watch on ESPN and ESPN+ at 10 p.m. ET.
SOCHI, RUSSIA - FEBRUARY 3, 2018: Nigerian boxer Olanrewaju Durodola (L) and his Russian rival Maxim ... [+] Vlasov struggle in their bout for the WBA cruiserweight title at the Bolshoy Ice Dome in Sochi. Valery Sharifulin/TASS (Photo by Valery Sharifulin\TASS via Getty Images) Valery Sharifulin/TASS
Joe Smith Jr. vs. Maxim Vlasov odds
As of this writing, Smith has the widest money line I’ve seen since the fight was first announced. On Bet 365, Smith is a -400 favorite, meaning you’d have to wager $400 to win $100. Vlasov is a +275 underdog (win $275 on a $100 wager). Earlier in the week, though, I saw Smith at -334 and Vlasov at +240. At Sports Betting Dime, meanwhile, Smith is at -400 with Vlasov at +270.
You can get solid value by taking Smith to win by KO/TKO at -110, but I like taking him to win by stoppage in rounds 7-12 at +300 even better.
UPDATE: After an exhausting and hugely exciting fight between two world-class boxers, Smith won his first world title with a majority decision victory. The judges had it 114-114, 115-113 and 115-112 (I scored it 114-114). Vlasov fought well, but Smith hurt him in the seventh round and did fantastic work in the 11th and 12th rounds to squeak out the victory. If you took Smith by stoppage, that’s not great news (and if you went with the draw at +1600, you got so very close). But if you wagered on a Smith victory via decision, you made $210 on a $100 bet.
If you were looking for a fun parlay for this weekend’s action of boxing (and this is only my opinion and not a recommendation), I might take Smith to win by stoppage at -110, Jaron Ennis to stop Sergey Lipinets at -305, and the over of 7.5 rounds in the Jerwin Ancajas vs. Jonathan Javier Rodriguez fight at -110. That would pay out $384 on a $100 wager.
Joe Smith Jr. vs. Maxim Vlasov records
Though Smith has three losses on his ledger, he’s one of the best at light heavyweight. Coming into Saturday night, he’s 26-3-1 with 21 KOs. And some of his previous victories are awfully impressive, including scoring a massive upset vs. Andrzej Fonfara with a first-round knockout and sending Bernard Hopkins into retirement by knocking him completely out of the ring. In retrospect, a 2017 loss to Sullivan Barrera doesn’t look great.
Vlasov isn’t well known in the U.S., but he’s had a long and solid career. At 45-3 with 26 KOs, the 34-year-old scored his biggest win against Isaac Chilemba in 2019. But he also has losses to Chilemba, Krzysztof Glowacki (at cruiserweight) and Gilberto Ramirez. Mostly, when he’s faced world-class opponents, Vlasov has lost. And Smith is world class.
Joe Smith Jr. vs. Maxim Vlasov prediction
Vlasov could present some issues for Smith. Smith expects Vlasov to be busy and aggressive, and Vlasov has a good chin (he’s only been knocked down a couple of times in his 48 fights and has never been stopped). But Smith’s boxing ability is underrated, and he’s got such great power in his hands. Vlasov could make this an even fight through the first few rounds, but Smith is going to end it midway through the bout. Call it Smith by stoppage in the eighth.
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9b1513a742872f3ae3e66e656c19bd79 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshkatzowitz/2021/04/15/jake-paul-vs-ben-askren-predictions-and-odds-fighters-make-their-picks/ | Jake Paul Vs. Ben Askren Predictions And Odds: Fighters Make Their Picks | Jake Paul Vs. Ben Askren Predictions And Odds: Fighters Make Their Picks
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA - MARCH 26: Jake Paul (L) and Ben Askren face off during a news conference for ... [+] Triller Fight Club's inaugural 2021 boxing event at The Venetian Las Vegas on March 26, 2021 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Paul and Askren will face each other in the main event that will take place on April 17, 2021, at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images) Getty Images
While you might scoff that the Jake Paul vs. Ben Askren fight on Saturday night is actually a thing available for people to watch and bet on, those who have created the odds for the match between the YouTube star and the former MMA standout have seen them shift.
[Make sure to follow the Paul vs. Askren live blog here.]
At first, Paul was the solid favorite, but according to one online sports book, 62% of the money then came in on Askren. Now, the odds have galloped back toward Paul’s side, because, as of Wednesday, Paul was the -200 favorite and Askren was the +160 underdog.
But even though this still should be considered a pick ‘em fight, that’s not necessarily how fellow boxers and mixed martial artists see it. They might point to Askren’s subpar striking and Paul’s early-career success in the ring as proof that Paul will win. Others might say that Askren is a world-class athlete and Paul is nothing more than a social media creation and then predict Askren will pull out the victory.
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“It’s a wild fight. I don’t know what to think,” UFC flyweight Joseph Benavidez said, via MMA Zone. “Jake Paul looks athletic and that he trains hard. The crazy thing about people like that when you’re just getting started, you’re fearless because you haven’t been beaten up yet. I think he picked the best opponent to highlight himself. There’s not a more accomplished MMA fight than Ben Askren that’s not as equipped in boxing.”
Either way, people are betting, and people undoubtedly will watch to see what happens on PPV on Saturday. So, let’s talk to the fighters and experts of combat sports who know these boxers better than most anybody else to see about their predictions.
Leon Edwards: The UFC welterweight contender who is coming off a no contest vs. Belal Muhammad and who could be facing Nate Diaz at UFC 262 thinks Paul is going to blast out Askren. And Edwards thinks that’s hilarious. “He’s going to get knocked out, I’m serious,” Edwards told talkSPORT. “It’s going to be bad for MMA, man. I don’t know who agreed to this. I don’t think it’s going to be good for MMA and he’s going to get chinned. But, it’s going to be funny to see.”
Teofimo Lopez: The lightweight boxing champion certainly didn’t mince words when asked about his Paul vs. Askren prediction by the Mayweather Channel on YouTube. “Man, Ben, you’d better whoop his [freakin’ butt].” But is that your prediction, that Askren will destroy Paul? Said Lopez: “Yes.”
Colby Covington: Perhaps the most controversial figure in all of MMA, the MAGA-loving welterweight thinks Paul is a joke. And he thinks Askren will get rid of him and bring some pride to the sport. “Hopefully Ben goes out there and knocks out Jake Paul,” Covington said, via BJPenn.com. “I’m just sick of hearing him talk. He’s just running his mouth and there’s no substance behind anything he says. I think he will [beat Paul], I think he’s just going to put that pressure on him. If he uses the clinch and just ties him up and just gets him tired, there’s no doubt he has a better gas tank than Jake Paul—some little YouTuber. The kid’s a complete joke, he’s an embarrassment to society, he’s an embarrassment to the MMA and boxing world in general. I hope Ben goes out there and shuts his mouth.”
Sean O’Malley: The UFC bantamweight doesn’t usually get excited for fights that involve others. But even though he knows Paul vs. Askren isn’t going to be a technical masterpiece, he looks forward to watching the sloppiness unfold before him. “I want to say Jake [will win] because he’s going to be a [better] boxer. But Ben is such a good competitor,” O’Malley told MMA Weekly. “It’s not going to be a good boxing fight. I hope Jake doesn’t try to put his lights out in the first two rounds. He’s going to gas out. Ben is going to be there all eight rounds. Ben is not going to gas. If Jake comes out calm and doesn’t get too excited, I think he can outbox him and stay behind his jab. I think Jake can get the job done.”
Demetrious Johnson: The legendary MMA featherweight said if somebody came to him and offered him $1 million to bet on the Paul-Askren fight, Johnson said he’d lay it all on Paul. “Ben Askren hasn’t been the best striker in mixed martial arts,” Johnson told MMA Fighting. “Do I think he’ll be the best striker in boxing? I would say I don’t think it’s gonna happen. … Yes, I know Jake Paul is a YouTube star. He’s training just as hard as a world champion is. He has unlimited access to the best trainers in the world. He has the funding, not saying Ben Askren doesn’t but anytime you fight somebody who has training, there’s always that chance. I’m not discounting Ben Askren out of this fight. … [But] I think [Paul is] gonna win the fight.”
Chatri Sityodtong: The chairman of ONE Championship is pointing toward Askren, especially if he and Paul engage in a firefight. “In a real street fight, he would destroy Jake Paul,” Sityodtong told Insider. “But this is a boxing match, which is Ben’s worst discipline. And Jake Paul does have knockout power—you can see it, you know, when you hit pads. But it’s one thing to hit pads and it’s another to get in a war. And if this fight gets into a war, I see Jake Paul breaking.”
Freddie Roach: The famed boxing trainer spent some time training Askren for this matchup, and he doesn’t try to hide his disdain for Paul. “I refer to Jake Paul as the ‘YouTube boob,’” Roach told MMA Fighting. “I’ve seen video of him fighting and his press conference with Ben. It’s really hard for me to watch him too long. As far as his boxing skills, I think he’s a product of good matchmaking. To me, he acts like a celebrity trying to be a boxer. I told Ben that beating Jake Paul would be more than a victory, it would be a public service ... I know one thing, when Ben knocks Jake Paul on his ass on Saturday night, YouTube will have itself a new most-viewed video highlight.”
Dana White: The UFC president is so confident that Askren is going to win that he said he bet $1 million on the outcome. Here’s how Paul responded to that on social media: “Dana let’s double the bet up! $2 Million. We wire the money into escrow. $4 million total. Winner takes all. My team will be in touch to make a contract. After I knockout Ben, we can set up Jake Paul vs Dana White 2021 since you consider yourself a ‘Boxer’' and me a ‘YouTuber.’”
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e187ca291f7f636a5ad2ab1401d4cf8d | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshkatzowitz/2021/04/17/jake-paul-vs-ben-askren-live-results-odds-purses-prediction/ | Jake Paul Vs. Ben Askren Live Results, Odds, Purses, Prediction (Video) | Jake Paul Vs. Ben Askren Live Results, Odds, Purses, Prediction (Video)
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA - MARCH 26: Ben Askren (R) shoves Jake Paul as they face off during a news ... [+] conference for Triller Fight Club's inaugural 2021 boxing event at The Venetian Las Vegas on March 26, 2021 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Paul and Askren will face each other in the main event that will take place on April 17, 2021, at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images) Getty Images
POSTFIGHT: The ref might have stopped the fight a little prematurely. But Askren was clearly hurt, and the ref decided he was in no shape to continue. Askren probably had 15-20 seconds to recover, because the ref told Paul to get back to his neutral corner. But Askren was still a little stumble-y.
It was just a simple 1-2 from Paul. A quick jab and a great straight right by Paul. Askren might have seen it coming, but he was nowhere near blocking that shot.
I’m not ready to say Paul is a great fighter (or even a very good one). But he’s got legit power.
Afterward, Paul climbs up to where the announcers are, and he gives Snoop Dogg a big hug. Said Paul, “It’s been four months. I’ve been in training camp. I deserved that. I told you all I’m a real fighter. I don’t know how many times I have to prove myself that this is real.”
First round: Pete Davidson says Askren has that “Vince Vaughn body.” He does not look as in shape as Paul. Paul wings a right at Askren, but Askren ducks. Paul lands a left and then a right to Askren’s body. Left hook to Askren’s head and he lands another body shot. Huge right by Paul, and Askren goes down. Are you serious?!? Askren gets up, and Paul is about to go after him. And the ref stops the fight. Paul wins by first-round TKO.
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Jake Paul ringwalk: All kinds of smoke fills the arena (not THAT kind of smoke), and Paul walks out with a dancing robot behind him. It’s like Iron Maiden’s Eddie mascot but perhaps a little more jolly. No mask, no hood for Paul. Just him in some trunks.
Ben Askren ringwalk: He’s strolling to the ring like it’s just another day of work. He doesn’t seem to have a worry in the world. It’s a no-frills moment. Of course, he’s been in big fights before.
UNDERCARD:
Regis Prograis (26-1, 21 KOs) TD win over Ivan Redkach (23-6-1): This is an important one for Prograis. A win vs. Redkach, and he said he’ll go after Adrien Broner and/or Gervonta “Tank” Davis. Either bout would make him plenty of money.
Through three rounds, Prograis looks solid. He’s landing good shots, and he’s getting away from most of what Redkach is throwing him. In the sixth round, Prograis was really starting to pound on Redkach, and it seemed like just a matter of time before this fight would be over. Oh, and the huge right hand to the body will finish off Redkach. Well, wait a second. Now, Redkach is saying it was illegal. And he appears to be seriously hurt.
Replays show it was a legal punch. It was nowhere near being low.
This so bizarre. Now, Redkach is going out on a stretcher. Prograis can’t believe any of this is happening.
Either way, Prograis wins by technical decision (60-54, 60-54, 59-55). He should have won it by KO.
Steve Cunningham (30-9-1, 13 KOs) UD win over Frank Mir (0-1): Mir, the former UFC heavyweight champ, makes his pro debut against the former cruiserweight titlist. I’ve got Cunningham in a blowout.
Through two rounds, Cunningham is outclassing Mir. And I think it’s only going to get worse for Mir.
Mir has a pretty good chin, and he does outweigh Cunningham by 70 pounds. But this should be a pretty wide win for Cunningham. And that’s exactly what happened. The judges had it 60-54, 60-54 and 58-54.
I’m still here, FYI. There just hasn’t been any boxing in about an hour or so. For some reason, Triller cameras captured Pete Davidson going into Jake Paul’s locker room for a benign prefight chat. It was fairly unexciting stuff. But what would happen if Davidson ventured over to Askren’s locker room?
Oh, and by the way ...
Joe Fournier (9-0, 9 KOs) TKO 2 over Reykon (0-1): It’s the reggaeton performer vs. an entrepreneur who actually used to be a pro boxer with some impressive power. If this gets into the second round, I’ll be shocked.
OK, it goes into at least the second round. Fournier is mostly working to the body. But he allows Reykon to survive. I think. Triller spent the last 30 seconds of the round focused on Pete Davidson joining the commentators table. Big left hook by Fournier put Reykon down about 30 seconds into the second round. Reykon gets up, though, and fights on. And Fournier goes down again with about a minute to go. And again, he gets up. Hey! Nobody can question this guy’s heart.
And before the fight goes into the third, the fight is stopped. And for good reason.
First up is the Black Keys with a musical performance. Wait, I thought this group had only two guys in it. Why are there, like, six guys on stage?
Preview: Now that all the predictions have been made and all the trash-talk has been uttered, it’s nearly time to see what will happen in the ring when Jake Paul faces Ben Askren. The YouTube star has been dominant in his two professional fights. The former MMA standout won the first 19 fights of his career. Now, it’s time to find out what occurs when the two boxing neophytes clash in a real fight. It’s nearly time for Jake Paul vs. Ben Askren.
The Paul vs. Askren PPV begins at 9 p.m. ET, and I’ll be here all night, giving my round-by-round thoughts, explanations and unofficial scoring of the main event and the undercard fights.
Until then, read more about the big fight.
Jake Paul vs. Ben Askren odds
Since Friday, the money line for Paul as the betting favorite has gotten wider to -188 (from -160) and Askren as the underdog (+137 from +135). That means you’d have to bet $188 to win $100 on a Paul win, and you’d earn $137 on a $100 wager for Askren.
BetOnline.ag, meanwhile, has some fun prop bets, including:
Either boxer to get knocked down -300 (1/3) No knockdowns +200 (2/1)
-Will Jake Paul be hooded DURING walkout to Ring?
Yes -500 (1/5) No +300 (3/1)
-Will Jake Paul be masked DURING walkout to ring?
Yes -250 (2/5) No +170 (17/10)
-First to bleed
Ben Askren -140 (5/7) Jake Paul Even (1/1)
-Will there be an official point deduction?
Yes +300 (3/1) No -500 (1/5)
According to a news release from OddsChecker on Friday, though, more of the money late in the week came in on Askren. “Late momentum is all against Jake Paul. Even those who don’t think Askren will win are beginning to bet on a draw,” OddsChecker spokesman Kyle Newman said. “... Askren has all the momentum on the market, now it’s just a matter of carrying that over to the ring.”
Jake Paul vs. Ben Askren purses
According to MMA Fighting, Paul will earn a $690,000 guarantee, while Askren will make $500,000. Paul reportedly made a guarantee of $600,000 to knock out Nate Robinson last year. But assuming Paul has a deal where he’ll make money on the number of PPVs sold, he’s likely in line to make plenty more once the receipts are tallied.
Both guarantees are less, though, than what Regis Prograis will make. Reportedly, Prograis will take home $850,000 to fight Ivan Redkach (who will earn $250,000) on the undercard.
Jake Paul vs. Ben Askren prediction
Here’s what I wrote previously: “I don’t really have any idea what’s going to happen. My best guesses would be that either Paul knocks out Askren early, Askren stops Paul late or Askren wins by decision. Despite their backgrounds, Paul legitimately might be a better pure boxer than Askren. So, it’s tough to make a call. To be honest, I feel kind of silly even writing this, but I’d go with Paul by stoppage in the third round.”
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d4e2f87ee597ef2b9229bd3e81a97117 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshkatzowitz/2021/04/17/regis-prograis-looks-to-steal-the-show-on-the-jake-paul-ben-askren-undercard/ | Regis Prograis Looks To Steal The Show On The Jake Paul-Ben Askren Undercard | Regis Prograis Looks To Steal The Show On The Jake Paul-Ben Askren Undercard
NEW ORLEANS, LA - JULY 14: Regis Prograis (R) fights Juan Jose Velasco during their WBC Diamond ... [+] Super Lightweight Title boxing match at the UNO Lakefront Arena on July 14, 2018 in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Photo by Alex Menendez/Getty Images) Getty Images
When Regis Prograis attended the Logan Paul vs. KSI fight in 2019, he wasn’t convinced a matchup between a couple of YouTube stars qualified as great news for the sport of boxing. Nineteen months later, though, Prograis is fully on board with the trend. So much so that Prograis is fighting Ivan Redkach on the undercard of Jake Paul vs. Ben Askren, and the former 140-pound titlist is cool with being the opening act for a couple of boxing neophytes.
It’s because Prograis now understands the potential power of the Paul brothers fighting in front of hundreds of thousands (or millions) of people on streaming services and in packed arenas.
Logan Paul vs. KSI was never going to be a technical masterpiece. Heck, it was barely boxing at all. But in Los Angeles’ Staples Center that night, Prograis felt the excitement. He saw young kids running around without any adult supervision nearby. He watched the arena fill with about 12,000 fans. He witnessed the power of mega-popular YouTubers who could bring plenty of new eyes to the sport.
“I was excited about it after I left the fight,” Prograis told me recently. “It was fun to watch. I kind of changed my mind from how I felt before. They’re bringing different eyes to the sport. You’ve got little kids running around and watching. I’m kind of all for it now. It was a whole different atmosphere. It was like a nice night out. It was kind of like a concert.”
That, Prograis said, might be what boxing needs. With the exception of a few fighters, boxers like Manny Pacquiao and Canelo Alvarez, most boxing matches are just matches. They’re not necessarily events. But Prograis will certainly be part of an event on Saturday on the Triller app.
Aside from the novelty of Paul, a YouTube star who has knocked out his two opponents in his pro career, and Askren, a former MMA standout who is making his boxing debut, Triller will also feature musical performances by Justin Bieber, The Black Keys, Doja Cat, Snoop Dog and Ice Cube. If you watched Triller’s previous boxing production, the Mike Tyson vs. Roy Jones Jr. exhibition, it was unlike just about any previous boxing telecast you might have seen before.
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There were multiple hip-hop music performances. There were different camera angles. There was a crispness to the broadcast. At times, it felt cinematic. More than 1.5 million reportedly bought that card on PPV. Maybe that figure won’t be repeated on Saturday, but Paul has his group of fans and Askren has his. And plenty of people will spend the $50 to watch it all on PPV.
Prograis (25-1, 21 KOs), who will make an $850,000 purse, wants to help cash in on the eyeballs who could be watching him for the first time.
“This could be a good thing,” he said. “We can use each other. Paul can use me for boxing, and I can use him for publicity.”
But it might not be great for boxing fans that they have to pay $50 for the card, especially when they might also be shelling out hundreds of dollars per year for DAZN, ESPN+, Showtime and other boxing PPVs. Prograis understands that point and can sympathize.
Ultimately, though, Prograis’ placement on this card is what’s right for his career at the moment.
“This might be the most exposure I have,” Prograis said.
And he could use some of it. Though Prograis is one of the best 140-pounders in the world, the biggest moment in his career so far was his close majority decision loss to Josh Taylor for two of the junior welterweight belts in 2019. Prograis didn’t fight for 370 days after that, because of the pandemic and because he and Maurice Hooker couldn’t come to an agreement on a catchweight between 140 and 147 pounds.
Yes, Prograis knocked out the previously undefeated Juan Heraldez in October 2020, but that was on the Gervonta “Tank” Davis vs. Leo Santa Cruz undercard, also on PPV. Though Prograis eventually wants to move up to welterweight, he still has plans for junior welterweight assuming he beats Redkach on Saturday (as of this writing, Prograis was an enormous -5000 betting favorite, while Redkach was an 18/1 underdog).
Though boxing fans might like to see Prograis take on the winner of the Josh Taylor vs. Jose Ramirez fight next month that will unify all four belts, he doesn’t see that happening anytime soon. So, he’d rather focus his attention on Adrien Broner and Davis.
“Broner and Davis are bigger profile fights,” Prograis said. “I want big fights. I want the belts. But Taylor is not going to fight me anytime soon. Every time a reporter asks Adrien Broner who he wants to fight, he says my name. That’s a huge fight at 140. If you put them against Taylor and Ramirez, I think more people would watch me and Broner. All those fights are easy. … Especially with Davis, they make weight classes for a reason. He’s strong, but he’s very, very small. I don’t think his power it’s going to translate to 140. Broner is tough. He’s never been stopped before. Hopefully, I can.”
First, though, he has to get past Redkach. Though Redkach (23-5-1, 18 KOs) is a big underdog, he lasted 12 rounds with Danny Garcia at welterweight in 2020 and scored a victory against former two-division titlist Devon Alexander. Prograis and Redkach have sparred together before as well, so Prograis knows what his opponent can bring to the ring.
Prograis just hopes he can make a big impression on all those fans who will be introduced to him for the first time on Saturday.
“I fought on Gervonta Davis’ undercard. That was a little frustrating,” Prograis said. “But I hadn’t fought in a whole year at the time. I was just happy to get back. It was cool. But now with this, it’s a big opportunity. There’s going to be a lot of different eyes on me.”
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e6d59652d1fc6f72f98489ea9306eedc | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshkatzowitz/2021/04/22/new-logan-paul-vs-floyd-mayweather-odds-have-been-released/ | New Logan Paul Vs. Floyd Mayweather Odds Have Been Released—And The YouTube Star Is Gaining Traction | New Logan Paul Vs. Floyd Mayweather Odds Have Been Released—And The YouTube Star Is Gaining Traction
SAITAMA, JAPAN - DECEMBER 31: Floyd Mayweather of the United States and Tenshin Nasukawa of Japan ... [+] exchange punches during the RIZIN. 14 at Saitama Super Arena on December 31, 2018 in Saitama, Japan. (Photo by Etsuo Hara/Getty Images) Getty Images
Now that Jake Paul has dispatched of Ben Askren, which then allowed sports books to post odds for his next potential opponent, it’s time for the oddsmakers to, once again, analyze the chances of Paul’s older brother to beat one of the best boxers in history. With The Athletic reporting that Logan Paul plans to meet Floyd Mayweather on Showtime PPV on June 5, one sports book has released some new odds on the boxing exhibition.
[UPDATE: The date has since been announced as June 6 at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami.]
According BetOnline.ag, Floyd Mayweather is a -2000 betting favorite vs. Paul, meaning you’d have to wager $2,000 to win $100. Paul, meanwhile, is a +900 underdog, which means you’d earn a $900 payday on a $100 wager.
Originally, Mayweather opened as a -5000 favorite, and Paul was +1500. So, that means the sports book believed those original odds were too wide. Considering Mayweather is 50-0 as a pro and Paul lost his only professional fight to fellow YouTube star KSI in 2019, that’s an interesting adjustment.
But Paul might have some advantages vs. Mayweather. Paul could outweigh Mayweather by as much as 30 pounds (according to The Athletic, Mayweather can’t weigh more than 160 pounds and Paul can’t weigh more than 190), and Mayweather hasn’t fought a professional fight since knocking out Conor McGregor in 2017 and making a guaranteed $100 million (Mayweather also took on Japanese kickboxer Tenshin Nasukawa in an exhibition a couple of years ago where Mayweather earned $9 million).
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For what it’s worth, Paul also is about six inches taller than Mayweather. Still, he has almost no chance in beating Mayweather, assuming this is a normal boxing match with a winner and a loser (unlike the Mike Tyson vs Roy Jones Jr. exhibition, which ended in a draw).
UPDATE: A day after The Athletic report dropped, Showtime Sports President Stephen Espinoza said on the SI Boxing With Chris Mannix podcast that June 5 definitely won’t be the date of the fight and that “it never has been.” Espinoza, though, said he “absolutely” believes the fight will occur at some point.
Here are some other odds for Mayweather vs. Paul.
Floyd Mayweather vs Logan Paul
Floyd Mayweather -2000 (1/20) Logan Paul +900 (9/1)
Weight differential at weigh-in
Over/Under 25.5 pounds
Where will fight take place?
Las Vegas 1/2 Los Angeles 3/1 Dallas 5/1 Miami 5/1 Atlanta 7/1 Cleveland 12/1
Will the fight take place June 5-6?
Yes -300 (1/3) No +200 (2/1)
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6603ebd44429b720eedb28109ca922e6 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshkatzowitz/2021/12/29/boxings-future-2021-moneymakers-list-features-a-ko-artist-the-son-of-a-legend--and-jake-paul/?sh=2a5122f2ae6b | Boxing’s Future 2021 Moneymakers List Features A KO Artist, The Son Of A Legend … And Jake Paul | Boxing’s Future 2021 Moneymakers List Features A KO Artist, The Son Of A Legend … And Jake Paul
LAS VEGAS, NV - DECEMBER 12: Edgar Berlanga and Ulises Sierra exchange punches during their fight at ... [+] the MGM Grand Conference Center on December 12, 2020 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Mikey Williams/Top Rank Inc via Getty Images) Top Rank via Getty Images
Like just about every year before it, the 2020 version of the future boxing moneymakers list had mixed results. After fighting four times in 2019, the quarantine slowed down Vergil Ortiz Jr., who knocked out journeyman Samuel Vargas in July but didn’t do much of anything else. Ryan Garcia, who fights his toughest opponent yet on Saturday vs. Luke Campbell, continues on his path to stardom (in boxing and as a social media star).
But YouTube star KSI, who made a $900,000 purse to beat Logan Paul last year, has been overshadowed by the Jake Paul vs. Nate Robinson fight and the upcoming Floyd Mayweather vs. Logan Paul exhibition, and he has made no move to get back in the ring. Meanwhile, Daniel Dubois just got knocked out by fellow British heavyweight Joe Joyce.
You’re right on some. You’re wrong on some. And life goes on in boxing.
As always, the sport needs more stars, so let’s take a look at the fighters who could become the future moneymakers beginning in 2021. (Just for fun, here’s the 2016 edition of Future Moneymakers, the 2017 edition, the 2018 version, the 2019 edition and the 2020 edition).
Here’s the newest crop of potential superstars: It might not necessarily happen in 2021, but for everybody listed below, they, in the next 12 months, could make major strides to becoming boxing's next big moneymakers.
1. Edgar Berlanga: If you know about Berlanga, it’s probably because of his first-round KO streak. Berlanga has had 16 fights. He’s had 16 knockout wins. All of them have come within the first three minutes of the fight. And that’s the fun of watching Berlanga now, because he’s not only competing against his opponent. He’s also competing against the clock. In his last fight, Berlanga knocked down Ulisis Sierra three times, but the fight was stopped with only 20 seconds remaining in the round. It was anxiety-producing and exhilarating at the same time. Obviously, there’s almost no chance this streak will continue long-term. But Berlgana is certainly building a name for himself now as a super middleweight prospect, and that could translate into big purses in the future.
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2. Tim Tszyu: The son of the legendary Kostya Tszyu, he’s been carving out an impressive career for himself. He got a huge boost this summer when he stopped former welterweight titlist Jeff Horn in an all-Australian showdown in front of 16,000 fans, and he followed that with a first-round TKO of the 21-1 Bowyn Morgan. Already, Tszyu is one of the biggest names in Australian boxing, and if he can get junior middleweight titlist Patrick Teixeira (or Brian Castano if he takes Teixeira’s belt in February) in the ring and then beats him, Tszyu could really begin to grow his global status.
3. Julio Cesar Martinez: While Martinez is the only non-prospect on this list— he’s actually relatively close to making my pound-for-pound list—he hasn’t made huge money yet. That’s because Martinez competes in the 112-pound flyweight division, and unless your name is Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez or Juan Francisco Estrada, both of whom are 115-pound super flyweights, it’s not easy to make big purses if you’re in the tiniest weight classes. Martinez made $100,000 when he won his title in title in 2019, but he’d probably have to move up to 115 pounds to make even more money than that.
MIAMI, FL - JANUARY 30: Jake Paul of Los Angeles California making his boxing pro debut against Ali ... [+] Al-Fakhir of London England making his pro debut on January 30, 2020 part of Matchroom Boxing and DAZN Miami Fight Night at the Meridian in Miami, Fl. (Photo by Rich Graessle/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images) Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
4. Jake Paul: Yep, for the second straight year, I’m putting a YouTube star who dabbles in boxing on this list. Well, actually, it appears that Paul is more than dabbling. It sounds like he’s serious about this endeavor. As Paul told me earlier this year, “I want to respect the sport. That’s the No. 1 thing. I know how hard boxing is. I want to respect it. I’m taking it seriously. People can see that. If I was going to go in there and be fighting and look like an idiot, I would hate me too. But I’m putting in the work. I’m working my ass off, and I look like a professional fighter.” Paul has made hundreds of thousands of dollars for knocking out fellow YouTuber AnEsonGib and former NBA star Nate Robinson, and Paul almost certainly deserves credit for helping the Mike Tyson vs. Roy Jones Jr. exhibition zoom past the 1 million PPV buy mark after fighting on the undercard. If Paul continues on this path, Paul will make millions more from his newest career.
5. George Kambosos Jr.: Similar to Tszyu, Kambosos has a built-in advantage because of where he lives. Since Australia has been one of the few countries to return to nearly normal during the coronavirus pandemic, Kambosos can fight in front of filled arenas or stadiums. And that’s one reason why Teofimo Lopez could face Kambosos there in 2021. “I’m 100% in favor of it. It’s a great opportunity for Teofimo,” Bob Arum, Lopez’s promoter, told Boxing Scene. “That’s what I’m hoping for. When the government in Australia gets rid of the 14-day quarantine for foreigners then I’m ready to move because already you can do these fights with full capacity stadiums in Australia.” Kambosos earned the two biggest wins of his career in the last 12 months, beating former world titlists Mickey Bey and Lee Selby by split decisions. Kambosos made a $166,000 payday vs. Selby. If he gets Lopez next, he’ll make exponentially more.
READ MORE:
Jake Paul Vs. Ben Askren Odds: The YouTube Star Is Somehow The Betting Favorite Against The Professional Fighter Floyd Mayweather Vs. Logan Paul Odds Are Not Nearly As Wide As They Should Be Boxing Pound For Pound: Teofimo Lopez Zooms Onto The List After Lomachenko Win
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96d58f2e24fe1c212ebd4d430e0d4330 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshlinkner/2012/08/23/5-reasons-why-your-dream-business-is-a-venture-capitalists-nightmare/ | 5 Reasons Why Your Dream Business Is A Venture Capitalist's Nightmare | 5 Reasons Why Your Dream Business Is A Venture Capitalist's Nightmare
Restaurant (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Getting a business off the ground takes a great idea, a high-quality team, a boatload of passion, lots of hard work, and an infusion of capital. Whether that capital comes from a venture investor, a micro grant, a bank loan, a line of credit, your personal savings, or crazy Uncle Charlie, it’s a must-have. The first question a new CEO must resolve is where to secure the needed capital. Many people think of venture capitalists first, but in reality, most concepts and business plans that lead to amazing, profitable businesses make for downright awful VC investments.
LIFESTYLE BUSINESS. A city isn’t a city without its restaurants, yoga studios, hair salons and other lifestyle businesses that define neighborhoods and establish distinctive flavors for each district. All of these establishments are valuable – not just to their patrons but also monetarily to their owners. Many of these businesses will go on to become gold mines; however, they lack scalability, a crucial component to any venture deal. A venture capitalist will assess her ability to achieve a minimum 10x return upon an exit, which most lifestyle businesses aren’t able to achieve.
LACK OF URGENCY. A venture capitalist is placing a big bet on a company, so a founder’s ability to hustle is paramount. Oftentimes, this ability to get things done is exhibited by experience – in the midst of adversity, a great leader finds a way to make it work and still triumph, rising above obstacles. Young founders (who haven’t established a track record of success yet) can present a venture capitalist with a conundrum: they’ve got no proof of longevity, but bring fresh perspectives and agility that can outweigh the inexperience in certain cases. The true nail in the coffin here is conservatism – playing it safe and stagnating with any sign of success. To truly make an impact, a company’s leader should use success as a catalyst to set the bar that much higher, continuing to innovate and improve, rather than accept the status quo.
LIMITED MARKET SIZE. Think of a set of concentric circles, representing potential customers for your new business. Jared Stasik, a DVP associate, utilizes an absurd example, clearly illustrating this key concept. First, envision all the people in the world. Then, all the people with pets. Next, all the people with hamsters. One more step to people with hamsters that only have three legs. Now, if your business involves prostheses for hamsters, you’ve got a great chance to capture a large percentage of this market, becoming a dominant player. However, the market itself for consumers with three-legged hamsters nicknamed “Tripod” willing to invest in a prosthetic limb for their pets is inherently tiny – in fact, too small to generate a 10x return, much like lifestyle businesses. The market share percentage you’d need to capture varies widely from one business to another, but the market in totality has to be big enough that your slice of lemon makes the juice worthy of a squeeze.
LACKLUSTER GROWTH. Typically, a venture fund is open for seven years, requiring a return to its limited partners after ten years. Because of this fiduciary responsibility to investors in a fund, a venture capitalist must have deals close within this ten-year span. For example, agricultural businesses are not a good fit for a VC firm: first year involves clearing the land, then planting, then five years of initial growth, then initial crops and repeated cyclically for years to come until a farm would be profitable enough to return an investment, potentially decades from that point. With limited partners expecting their payouts, it’s impossible for a VC to wait around for 20 years to watch a business grow. Again, this doesn’t mean farms aren’t amazing businesses. They often are. They are just not the right fit for a VC.
LONE WOLF. A company must fit into a VC’s investment thesis. If it doesn’t match, that firm won’t fund it – though it’s not to say another investor wouldn’t fund it. For example, Detroit Venture Partners (my firm) utilizes an all-digital strategy to invest in early stage companies committed to the city of Detroit. If an entrepreneur comes to us with an earth-shattering idea in pharma or green energy, they will receive our awe and admiration, but not our check. When limited partners invest in a venture fund, they essentially give the venture capitalists free reign to gamble their money – using the strategy set forth in the limited partnership agreement. Because of this contract, VCs are required to stick to this jointly pre-determined plan and are contractually prevented from having even one lone wolf in their portfolio, no matter how sexy that wolf may in fact be.
Funding is one important piece of a huge puzzle when starting a company and getting it off the ground – it is often what allows the other pieces to fall into place.. If you’re gung ho about opening a restaurant, that’s amazing news. While I can’t wait to eat there, I won’t be funding it.
Might be time to phone Uncle Charlie.
For more insight on creativity and innovation, visit JoshLinkner.com.
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609fecbd05cb76dc1706b14f5f354f9d | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshlinkner/2014/09/11/why-all-pixar-movies-suck-at-first/ | Why All Pixar Movies 'Suck' (At First) | Why All Pixar Movies 'Suck' (At First)
In his book, Creativity, Inc., Pixar president Ed Catmull explained that “early on, all of our movies suck. That’s a blunt assessment, I know, but I choose that phrasing because saying it in a softer way fails to convey how bad the first versions really are. I’m not trying to be modest or self-effacing. Pixar films are not good at first, and our job is to make them so—to go, as I say, ‘from suck to not-suck.’” Now, Pixar is the world’s animation powerhouse, which seemingly churns out hit after hit with incredibly detailed, beautiful work that’s detail-oriented and as close to perfect as would seem possible. So how could something so creative and great be a "sucky" product at first?
When we think of creativity, we often associate the process with a lightning bolt. You’re in the shower, or vacuuming, or perhaps sitting in traffic, and boom – an idea just hits you, out of thin air. Most people think that this stroke of genius generates an idea that’s ready for prime time. Because of this thinking, many more people incorrectly believe they’re incapable of such a thought process, that this type of thinking is only reserved for artists, writers, or designers. Yes, the artsy crowd can have these thoughts, but here’s the inside scoop: so can you.
The front gate to Pixar Studios (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Your lightning bolt of an idea in the shower doesn’t have to come out as the finished product. Instead, that spark is just a first element. As Catmull alludes, the real creative process is taking that fledgling spark and then moving it along through 1,000 points of refinement. In that sense, your first thought could be just as "sucky" as a Pixar movie – and end up as gorgeous as one, too.
At your company, team members will need a creative culture in which to flourish, bringing their own ideas from the vacuum lightning-bolt to completion. It takes guts and creativity to question a system and claim ownership of your role and ideas, which means we need to create a new culture within our organizations. One that rewards team members for questioning outdated policies, and brings forth ideas worth sharing. Through extensive research and 20+ years of experience, I’ve discovered seven key principles for building and maintaining a creative culture.
Fuel passion – companies that can rally their teams around a clear and important purpose and create a fun and inspiring environment for achieving that purpose inject passion deep into their teams. Celebrate ideas – this isn’t just about handing out bonus checks for great ideas. Celebrate creativity with praise (both public and private), career opportunities, and perks. Foster autonomy – the act of creativity is one of self-expression. Tell your team what results you’re looking for, then get out of their way. Encourage courage – encourage your employees to say what they think, make tough decisions without excessive agonizing, take smart risks, and question anything that’s inconsistent with your organization’s core values. Fail forward – some bets will pay off, some will fail. The key is to fail quickly by experimenting with ideas and letting go of those that don’t pan out. Think small – whatever your organization’s size, try to approach creativity like one of the ‘smalls,’ by being curious and nimble, maintaining a sense of urgency, and embracing change. Maximize diversity – human diversity in thought, work experience, religions, nationalities, hobbies, political beliefs, races, sexual preference, age, musical tastes, and even favorite sports teams helps build creative cultures.
As you cultivate your own creative culture, remember that the true work is moving anyone’s "sucky" idea from initial spark to wonderful, final product that could be a game-changer for your company.
For an inside view into my world as a VC, entrepreneur, author, and keynote speaker, visit JoshLinkner.com and order my new book, “The Road to Reinvention,” on Amazon.
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8722f8bccbb9bc8f9e7fef6e2d6c4064 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshlinkner/2015/02/12/6-ways-to-make-your-customers-fall-in-love-with-you/ | 6 Ways To Make Your Customers Fall In Love With You | 6 Ways To Make Your Customers Fall In Love With You
As Valentine’s Day rolls around again this weekend, love is in the air. This week especially, people are focused on the most important human emotion of all. The greeting card aisle is crowded with customers searching high and low for the perfect way to express sentiments toward their partners. Florists are inundated with orders and restaurants are packed with reservations, as ways for lovebirds to show how much they care for one another. Simply put, love moves people to action. When we utter “till death do us part,” we’ve expressed the ultimate in loyalty, so expressing that is paramount.
So while you scour the racks for a just-for-my-sweetie card, or bake cookies for your kids, or get surprised with a bouquet at your desk, why aren’t you thinking about your customers in the same context? We can all relate to romancing our significant others, so why not "romance" your customers? Are you just fulfilling a job or are you building the "love"? What can you do to stand out and make them fall in love with you?
1. Create a deep emotional connection. Even if you met your better half at a bar, your longterm relationship isn’t just about that initial spark. You’re on each other’s wavelength with hobbies, dreams, travels, and desires. You sought out this information from her over time, as your relationship grew and developed, and it’s changing every day. Do the same with your clients. What do they hope to gain? What are they afraid of? Where can you find common ground? If it’s clear that you’re working toward understanding your client’s intricacies, you’ll be sure to stand out.
2. Demonstrate you have the same values. As a casual fling develops into a serious couple, it’s because of an alignment of values: family, religious beliefs, location preferences, lifestyle choices, etc. For customers, it’s no different when choosing a company’s product or service – is it aligned with their needs?
3. Make it sizzle. In order to last, any relationship has to be fun, exciting, and even sexy. Dinner on the couch in front of the TV every night just doesn’t cut it – things have to still feel new and different, even if you’ve been together for decades. Would you still buy from a company that was stagnant? I don’t think so – I’d much prefer to spend my money with a team that’s on the forefront, always innovating and keeping me engaged.
4. Show your loyalty. As a good partner, you need to make it clear you'll have your significant other’s back, even (and especially) when things go wrong. We vow to support our spouse “in sickness and in health,” and so on and so forth. For your clients, make this same promise – and keep it. You can’t guarantee a perfect performance record, but you can guarantee that you’ll make it right when things aren’t 100% as they should be.
5. Sprinkle in some mystery and intrigue. With your loved one, a little surprise and delight never hurts, as you continually are able to keep it fresh. A gift for no reason? Yes, please. A spontaneous weekend getaway? Why not? A surprise party with family for a big birthday? Talk about feeling appreciated. Customers are no different – why not send them an unexpected “thank you” note or care package? You can be rest assured that they’ll be gabbing about that to their network when they get the mail that day.
6. Show you have THEIR best interest ahead of your own. In any relationship, this is the ultimate demonstration of love, because it shows you truly care about the other person and are willing to sacrifice for his/her benefit. This happens all the time in relationships – moving for a spouse’s job, taking on more hours so someone can be a full-time homemaker, eating healthier to support someone dieting… the list is long here, folks. And yet, most people approach any business relationship (especially one with negotiation involved) wondering what’s in it for me. If you take this oppositional, supportive approach into a meeting, you’ll be amazed at how appreciative people will be of your attitude.
The same principles that make us fall in love with each other can be deployed for your business, as long as you do it in a thoughtful, authentic, and (of course) loving way.
For an inside view into my world as a VC, entrepreneur, author, and keynote speaker, visit JoshLinkner.com and order my new book, “The Road to Reinvention,” on Amazon.
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065ba5e9b3ede8805634676ab4b8a3a4 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshlinkner/2016/02/15/can-innovation-save-1-3-million-lives-each-year/ | Can Auto Innovation Save 1.3 Million Lives Each Year? | Can Auto Innovation Save 1.3 Million Lives Each Year?
Rightfully so, the global community reacts in outrage when terrorists take the lives of innocent citizens. Millions walk in solidarity to stomp out breast cancer, while entire communities take to the streets in protest over deadly violence. But we seem to just accept the 1.3 million deaths - and 50 million injuries - related to auto accidents. In fact, car crashes claim more lives each year than war, malaria, terrorism, murder, breast cancer, suicide, or illegal drugs.
We attack these other global issues with urgency and outrage, driven to eradicate these insidious problems. Yet we seem to think of auto-related deaths and injuries as simply a part of life.
Samir Salman will have none of it. As the CEO of Continental Corporation's NAFTA division, Salman and his team are on a mission: to put an end to auto deaths and accidents once and for all. It turns out that nearly 90% of car accidents are caused by human error. So the Continental team is working tirelessly to bring autonomous driving to the mainstream, hoping to put a massive dent in the global problem of car crashes.
I had the opportunity to go for a ride in a self-driving car prototype with Mr. Salman. Admittedly, I was a bit nervous as we raced down a crowded highway at 70 mph with no hands on the wheel, but after a while I was able to fully grasp the possibilities. In addition to saving lives, automated driving could reduce rush hour traffic by 50% or more. It can reduce fuel consumption, increase productivity, and save millions of hours per year for drivers.
According to Salman, the technology will be fully ready by 2025, but the tech isn't the biggest hurdle. Regulatory challenges, security, and driver acceptance are all on the minds of his team as they race toward a cure. These are hard problems that require enormous tenacity, grit, and resiliency to solve.
Will Continental enjoy commercial success by pioneering fully autonomous driving? Sure. But that's not what fires up a team for long hours and sacrifice. The money will come as a byproduct of pursuing a higher calling - to save lives and make the world a better place.
As a leader, you may wonder why your team lacks motivation. Perhaps your crew is all too quick to punch out at 5pm sharp and isn't demonstrating the drive you'd like to see. Instead of blaming the team, try looking in the mirror. Great leaders inspire action by working toward a mission far greater than healthy gross margins. People bring their full arsenals of creativity, passion, and intensity when they're doing work that matters. The more important the calling, the more commitment you'll receive from your team. Innovation doesn't happen by cracking the whip or offering a bonus - it's harnessed through the pursuit of a worthy cause.
Zoom out from your quarterly financial targets, and re-focus on greater meaning and purpose. How can your work change the world? How can you make history?
Chase money and you'll seldom find it. Pursue greatness, and the economic rewards will follow. Focus your team on the biggest possible impact to unlock innovation, conquer your most pressing challenges, and enjoy sustainable success.
Samir Salman is fueled to save 1.3 million lives. What fuels you?
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24912de295f3c444221a896d5c65abd5 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshmax/2015/11/25/sitting-in-paul-mccartneys-1966-aston-martin-db6/?sh=315cc5c7283f | Sitting In Paul McCartney's 1966 Aston-Martin DB6 | Sitting In Paul McCartney's 1966 Aston-Martin DB6
James Bond's Aston-Martin DB5, driven in 1964’s “Goldfinger,” had machine guns in the front fenders, an ejector seat, tire slicers in its wheels and other handy accessories.
But did 007 write “Hey, Jude” in it? No. And for some of us, that counts for more than tossing a live wire onto a metal railing and electrocuting Odd Job.
Furthermore, James Bond is a fictitious character and Paul McCartney’s a real, live bloke who wrote one of the Beatles’ most well-known songs in his 1966 Aston-Martin DB6, hand-built to the cute Beatle’s specifications.
For the few people who still don't know the story behind the "Hey, Jude," it was originally titled “Hey Jules." The song was composed in 1968 for Julian Lennon, whose Mom Cynthia was going through a divorce from John Lennon and who Paul was on his way to console. The left-handed bassist brought with him, so legend has it, a single red rose and, most likely, Words of Wisdom.
It so happened that Paul McCartney's ex-DB6 (he sold it in 1971) was an hour’s drive from Aston-Martin’s Graydon headquarters where I'd just had a tour one rainy English morning. Invited to have a peek, a tire-kick and a sit, off I trekked to dig the Fabness of Paul’s old whip.
It is a fine little firecracker, handsome, elegant and suitably posh. Finished in "Goodwood" Green with leather upholstery and optional chrome wheels with three-ear spinners, the car housed a reel to reel tape recorder (now removed) mounted in the dashboard. It’s a surprisingly tiny set of wheels, especially given Paul’s 5’11 height, and it’s also hefty at 3,417 pounds. But its 282 horses making a top speed of 152 MPH, its pencil-thin wooden steering wheel and shift, old-school toggle switches, snug back seat and all-black interior make it a smart, elegant ride befitting of a Beatle who, that year, also composed "Lady Madonna," "Blackbird," "Back In The U.S.S.R," "I Will" and others. Martha, Paul's sheepdog made notorious in "Martha, My Dear," occasionally rode in the back seat, too.
Did Fab Four energy envelope me as I circled the car and finally sat in it, hoping perhaps to feel a shiver similar to the shiver the music of the legendary group evokes in me, you and millions of others here and there to this day?
No. But I was never that sort of Beatle-nut - I wear no t-shirts, own no mugs and would not scream "Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul!" if I saw the man emerge from a restaurant or stage door.
Then again, I don't think I'd mind having the glass Paul broke during one of the takes of "Norwegian Wood," or the squeaky drum pedal Ringo used on "All I've Got To Do."
What remains in The End is the music.
And the Bond car from "Goldfinger?" It was stolen in Boca Raton, Florida, in 1997, and is still missing.
-Josh Max
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e8a854b94516e128f9a12dcdefd6890f | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshmax/2020/02/13/test-drive-aston-martins-ferocious-2020-vantage/ | Test Drive: Aston Martin’s Ferocious 2020 Vantage | Test Drive: Aston Martin’s Ferocious 2020 Vantage
It’s a been a jolly good month for the British maker of “shaken, not stirred” supercars. Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll pumped $239 million dollars into the company earlier this year, after the company had spent most of last year being publicly traded, its future uncertain. Read all about that deal, and details, here.
Other good news for the brand came this week with the unveiling of the much-awaited 2021 Vantage Roadster in advance of the Geneva Auto Show next month. The Roadster's floptop can be lowered in a mere 6.7 seconds while stopped, or 6.8 seconds up to 31 M.P.H., making it the fastest opening-and-closing top in the world. Its twin-turbocharged V8, 503 horsepower engine, upscale interior and seven-speed optional manual transmission doesn’t hurt it a bit, either.
Aston Martin Vantage Roadster Manufacturer
Me? I was in need of a test Aston Martin in Los Angeles and wasn't picky, as I told the nice man who emailed me back: “I do have a magnetic silver Vantage Coupe available if you think that’d work.”
I assured him that it would indeed work.
2020 Aston Martin Josh Max
Soon I was sitting on the 405 in Los Angeles, stuck in traffic like everybody else. But did I mind? Not a bit. Unlike some supercars which excel only on the track and are a clunk-fest at slow speeds, especially with a standard shift (mine was automatic) the Vantage coupe motivates sweetly and smoothly at 10-15 miles per hour for however long the arteries are clogged. The only thing I noticed quickly was that the brakes (Brembo, of course) are as “tight as Dick's hatband” and one must tread gently, gently, gently in stop-and-go traffic so as not to jerk, jerk, jerk.
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2020 Aston Martin Center controls Josh Max
As soon as we were out in the open, though, that's the last anyone else saw of me for a bit. The 2020 Vantage's looks are as sharp and cut as a bodybuilder’s abs (and there were plenty of those in Los Angeles) yet it doesn’t immediately scream its identity to the untrained eye. This lets you weave in and out of traffic with the effortlessness of a ballerina, but minus the gawking you get in some ultra-high end cars. It’s low to the ground, with generous hips, a sharply angled rear windshield and twin exhausts with large tail pipe finishers.
2020 Aston Martin Josh Max
It’s got a carved, bulging hood and extra-large headlights. In short, it's gorgeous, an ultra-luxurious sportster offering sublime comfort via a cabin hand-trimmed in beautiful, natural materials, primarily wood and leather. Even the starter button is made from clear glass.
2020 Aston Martin Josh Max
Is it fast? Oh, yes. A 503 horsepower, 4.0 litre Twin Turbo V-8 engine coupled with an 8-speed auto transmission, electronic rear differential and dynamic torque vectoring add up to either a cannon blast, if you want and need, or that delicious low, rumbly, growling grizzly bear thing on runs to the grocery store or the mall. Your engine and suspension can be adjusted to a choice of Sport, Sport Plus and Track, each of which will affect the throttle response, traction control and chassis damping.
2020 Aston Martin Vantage Josh Max
Most of the time, as I was on either freeways, twisty roads or local thoroughfares, I kept it to a reasonable speed, in “Sport” and that was enough for me. Public roads, you know. Also, gas was close to $5 a gallon and the Vantage takes Premium, so every time you gas up, it's like taking someone to a nice restaurant, with drinks. Cough up, cowboy.
Inside, the two-tone seats are ultra-contoured and firm with extra support for both your thighs, which lends itself to long-distance trips unlike some sporty wheels whose seats cause aches after 60 minute drives. To get in and out practically requires a stick of butter even if you're not a big person. You start off sort of dumping yourself in as someone would dump a bucket of water, get situated and regard the majesty surrounding you. How many ways are there to say “This smells good?” Not enough. With the windows down you can get a whiff of that luxury leather from a few inches away and it draws you in like Mom's chicken soup.
2020 Aston Martin View of Cockpit Josh Max
The steering wheel’s fat and small-ish, the better to negotiate tight turns. You can order a variety of wood finishes or carbon fibre. Stitched leather surfaces are thick, sturdy and pleasing to the eyes and nose. Climate controls, pedal pads and gearshift are finished in satin aluminum. The audio system can be designed to your specs.
If Aston Martin isn’t as much a household name as some other name badges (One person said “It’s an Ashton-Martin?”) it’s that much more of a rare jewel, and the Vantage just about as exclusive and pleasurable as it gets.
Price, with options: $172,169
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1b5dc52ca316d9ea8a4cd248c08f96f4 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshmax/2020/07/16/five-safety-tips-for-city-scooter-riding/?sh=62ded0ddf5cd | Five Safety Tips For City Scooter Riding | Five Safety Tips For City Scooter Riding
NEW YORK, NY - JUNE 18: A Revel brand moped sits parked on a residential street, June 18, 2019 in ... [+] the Brooklyn borough of New York City. The ride-share moped company has deployed over 1,000 electric mopeds through Brooklyn and Queens. The fully electric mopeds top out at 30 miles per hour and are available to rent by the minute via smartphone. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images) Getty Images
Update: On Saturday, a 26-year-old Brooklyn woman riding as a passenger on a Revel scooter was killed following a crash, whose investigation is ongoing. Please read this article knowing that scooters are not toys, and you can be injured or killed while driving or riding as a passenger. Stay safe out there, please. JM
Scooters in urban areas are loved and loathed, depending on whom you ask. Whatever your opinion, they’ve regained popularity in certain cities during the pandemic and are being withdrawn in other domiciles. That’s another story for another time.
Thanks to a Brooklyn relative who just started using Revel - an electric moped sharing company - and who emailed me a few questions regarding the safe use of two-wheeled machines, I thought I’d offer my readers my five essential safety tips for scooter-riding. Some may seem obvious, and they are, but the key to motoring safety is drilling, drilling, drilling until safe and conscious behavior becomes automatic, like putting on a seatbelt or signaling before you turn. (You do signal before a turn, don’t you? Of course you do!)
Here are five tips to keep safe on the mean streets.
*Wear a helmet
(Photo by Juan MABROMATA / AFP) (Photo by JUAN MABROMATA/AFP via Getty Images) AFP via Getty Images
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No one leaves their abode thinking “I have to get milk, withdraw money at the bank, and crash.” That’s why they call them “accidents.”
Get in the habit of wearing a DOT-approved helmet just like you wear your anti-covid mask. Think of your helmet as a condom for your head - it feels much better without it, but all it takes is one mistake and your life can change forever. In this case, that means skull fractures, concussions and other injuries that can be minimized or even completely avoided if you wear a helmet.
If you don’t want to spring for a brand-new helmet, you can get one used. Lots of people buy them and never wear them for one reason or another. Just make sure it hasn’t been in a crash, after which it must be discarded. Go forth on CraigsList and garage sales. But wear the darned thing.
*Remember that scooters aren’t bicycles
(Photo by Axel Heimken/picture alliance via Getty Images) dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images
Anything on two wheels that exposes you to fresh air on a nice warm day seems to bring out the kid in all of us. But scooters are machines, and things can go wrong with machines that have nothing to do with how skillful you may be. So even if you’re in great shape and have been bicycling all your life, take your time with your first scooter - don’t just blast off. Anyone can go fast. It’s cornering, stopping, anticipating and taking evasive action that’s the tricky part. Find an empty parking lot and practice acceleration, stopping from full speed, making turns and other skills you should know before you take to the streets.
*Them potholes
NEW YORK, NY - AUGUST 30: Pedestrians stop and look at a sinkhole caused by a water main break on ... [+] Amsterdam Avenue, in the Upper West Side section of Manhatten, August 30, 2016 in New York City. Water started flowing Monday night from a broken pipe and crews continued with repairs on Tuesday morning. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images) Getty Images
You may come across the occasional gaping hole in your domicile, or, if you scooter in New York City, you’ll find potholes are as common as sewer rats. If you come across a pothole and have enough time, slow down, get off the brakes and smoothly and sweetly swerve around it.
If there’s no time or room to avoid the pothole, brake as hard as you can before impact, then get off the brakes and let the machine take the brunt. What you don’t want is to be braking while you’re turning or taking a direct hit - it’ll throw you off balance. And keep both hands firmly on the handlebars - they can be shot out of your hands if you don’t maintain a tight grip.
*Adjust your riding style for your cargo
(Photo by Horacio Villalobos - Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images) Corbis via Getty Images
Most likely you’ll use your scooter for groceries, hardware supplies or similar. If you have a side bag filled with milk, cans of soup, orange juice and other heavier objects, it’s like carrying a dumbell with one hand. and your balance will definitely be affected. Slow down, pay attention to your balance and motor skills and take extra time coming up to red lights or making sharp turns. It’s best to use a backpack so all the extra weight is centered behind you rather than tipping you left and right. But by all means, don’t just blast off from Home Depot without sensing where your cargo lies, and adjusting your riding style.
Focus, focus, focus
(Photo by Tim Graham/Getty Images) Getty
Ok, here’s a brag, and I’ll knock gas tank after posting, but I’ve been riding motorcycles and scooters for 18 years now, and have never gone down. Why?
Not because of helmets, safety equipment, ABS brakes or rabbit’s feet. It’s because the most important aspect of getting on a two-wheeled machine is awareness. It’s keeping your eyes open and getting in the habit of anticipating danger and taking direct evasive action. See the car up ahead coming opposite your way? It’s very possible the driver won’t signal and make a left turn in front of you, which is where the majority of fatal scooter and bike crashes happen. I was in Central Park once and a guy wearing earbuds, texting on his phone and blading the opposite the direction of traffic was was headed straight toward me. Zip! Around him I went. No need to scream, or elect yourself king of the world, screaming corrections at the open-mouthed, oblivious mob.
Assume other drivers are drunk, stoned, angry or spaced out, and plan accordingly. Be that Buddha behind the handlebars. Breathe deeply, take your time, be super-aware, and scootering will be the fun and rewarding endeavor it’s meant to be, and your friends and family and Mom will thank you.
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817d9bc8f6cbf7740606fea894ce6f95 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshmax/2021/04/22/for-earth-day-how-to-off-road-responsibly/ | For Earth Day: How To Off-Road Responsibly | For Earth Day: How To Off-Road Responsibly
Off-roading Josh Max
For others unfamiliar with off-roading etiquette, there are hordes out there who wish you were, including Mama Nature herself. Today is her day, so let’s take a look at how to honor Mom when off-roading.
This list of tips was assisted partially by Tread Lightly!, a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to promoting responsible outdoor recreation through stewardship and educational programs, who announced a partnership with BFGoodrich Tires Outstanding Trails Program this last Monday.
Stay on designated roads and trails.
Go over, not around, obstacles to avoid widening an existing trail. In soft terrain, avoid wheel spin and rutting by balancing your load, lowering tire pressure, and going easy on the gas.
2021 Jeep Overland Josh Max
Yield right-of-way to...everything. That means hikers, runners, motorcyclists, and horses. If you see a horse coming your way, pull over to the right and, preferably, shut off your engine, unless there are a lot of horses, in which case you should just go slow.
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Elephant, Chobe National Park, Botswana. (Photo by Giovanni Mereghetti/Education Images/Universal ... [+] Images Group via Getty Images) Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Educate Yourself Beforehand
Rules are different from state to state, town to town and county to county. If you get pulled over and tell the officer you didn’t know about this or that regulation, it’s not going to get you out of a ticket. Know the laws before going in. Obtain travel maps and regulations from public agencies. Also, remember that most existing laws are there because some off-roader before you did something dumb, like starting a fire, driving over a protected area or such. Don’t be that guy.
Four-wheel drive Nissan Patrol SUV of the Lgreglan / Icelandic Police in winter, Vik, Iceland. ... [+] (Photo by: Arterra/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Avoid Sensitive Areas
These include meadows, lakeshores, wetlands and streams and seasonal nesting and breeding areas. There doesn’t have to be a sign - just use common sense and common courtesy. Birds don’t come into your house and build a nest on your piano, so don’t go to their house and misbehave.
MENLO PARK, CA - APRIL 11: A Canada goose looks out from vegetation on Greco Island marsh at Bedwell ... [+] Bayfront Park in Menlo Park, Calif., on Sunday, April 11, 2021. The salt pond R4 will be converted to a marsh like Greco Island with sediment that will be dredged from the bay to help build up the area hopefully to alleviate sea level rise. (Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images) Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images
Clean up after yourself
Leave the area better than you found it. Take all trash out with you and, if you have it in you, pick up trash where you see it, because trash attracts more trash.
Assistant Ranger David Wodehouse walks through a blanket of bluebells near their peak at the ... [+] National Trust's Basildon Park near Goring-on-Thames in Berkshire, where careful management of the estate's ancient woodland by trust staff and volunteers enables the bluebells to thrive. Picture date: Thursday April 22, 2021. (Photo by Jonathan Brady/PA Images via Getty Images) PA Images via Getty Images
Give right-of-way to any vehicle traveling uphill.
More can go wrong when you’re ascending rather than descending, so let the other person come up before you head down.
Communicate to others
2021 Jeep Overland Josh Max
Alert oncoming traffic to possible hazards behind you, whether it’s a downed tree or a particularly tricky section of terrain. If you’re part of a caravan, each member of the caravan should indicate what’s behind them either verbally or with fingers, ie. 4 fingers for four more Jeeps. If you are the last in a caravan, hold up a fist - that means “No one behind me.”
If a gate is closed when you come across it, close it after you’ve gone through.
(Photo by: Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) Universal Images Group via Getty Images
A gate is closed for a reason, most likely to discourage animals from ambling to where people are, and it’s good manners to close it if you found it closed. (That’s assuming you are not trespassing on private property, which of course should be avoided.)
Keep a reasonable distance from the vehicle in front of you.
If they’re negotiating a particularly challenging area and either get stuck or have to back up, they’ll need room, so give it to them. Also, if you’re too close and they get stuck, you might get stuck, too.
Ask if someone who seems to need help if they need help, and give it to them.
No one wants to spoil their day of off-roading, but it’s polite to stop and ask if someone needs help if that appears to be the case. That might mean offering mean water, gasoline if you can spare it, help pushing someone or towing them out of a spot their vehicle can’t handle, use of your phone if theirs has crappy signal or is out of battery, and so on. (Wiping the phone off with disinfectant and after the other person borrows it, of course.)
2021 Jeep Overland, spare gas and water containers Josh Max
Be considerate when camping.
Don’t slam doors, don’t play ear-splitting music if there are people around and don’t build a fire that’s so big that if it gets out of control you can’t put it out. Also, leave people alone who want to be left alone.
A camper enjoys an early automotive campground in Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone National Park. ... [+] (Photo by F. Jay Haynes/Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images) Corbis/VCG via Getty Images
Don’t drink while you drive.
Beer with slash through it Josh Max
Some people think that because you are not on a public highway and most likely won’t get to speeds over 15 MPH, that it’s ok to get hammered when off-roading. But alcohol and motor vehicles are a time-tested recipe for disaster, and you can get a DUI even in the woods, so chill with the booze.
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0f3673e62482cdbdb343f8ee947e16ef | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshsteimle/2013/09/29/the-anti-social-ceos-guide-to-social-media/ | The Anti-Social CEO's Guide To Social Media | The Anti-Social CEO's Guide To Social Media
My fellow contributor Mark Fidelman in 2012 claimed that an IBM study showed that CEOs who don’t use social media are at a competitive disadvantage to those who do. Josh James, founder and CEO of Domo [Full disclosure: We not only share two names but James was also my boss at Omniture.], says “CEOs who shun social media risk losing touch with some of their most lucrative customers, prospects and influencers.” A study released this year found that 76% of executives want their CEOs to be active on social media, while another study found that only 5.6% of Fortune 500 CEOs are active on Twitter. What’s all this add up to? A massive guilt trip for anti-social CEOs.
Guilt leads to one of two choices; 1) action, or 2) rationalization. There are some who say most CEOs shouldn’t be on Twitter. I agree. But some should be, and if you’re one of those that should be then don’t use such opinions to rationalize making a poor decision. Take action instead. Here are 3 tips for getting started:
Do It. If you’re merely going to set up social media profiles and then do nothing with them, that’s another reason to avoid social media altogether. Warren Buffett first tweeted on May 2nd, 2013. He has tweeted a grand total of three times since then. He’s also not following a single other Twitter user. When he had no profile his admirers could justify it. But to set up a profile and then not use it makes it look as though Buffett is asleep at the wheel. It’s worse than if he had never set up a profile in the first place. Look to Richard Branson as an example to follow. He follows 3,820 other Twitter users, and has tweeted 4,118 times as of the writing of this post. He follows his own advice to corporate leaders regarding social media, “Be authentic and organic. It can't be forced or it won't work. And most importantly, have fun.” Do It Yourself. If you’re not going to control your own social media profiles, then you shouldn’t be on social media. Being social does not mean tasking your marketing department with setting up social media profiles with your name on them and posting content as if they were you. If you’re going to do this then you might as well just set up a corporate profile or direct people to the “press” section of your website. Being effective on social media means being authentic, and that means the content being posted needs to come directly from you. If it doesn’t, it will be obvious to your followers and you’ll get little to no traction, even if you’re a business superstar who can attract lots of followers by dint of your name alone. Do It Now. I know what you’re thinking. “This sounds interesting, I’ll have to look into this next week.” You and I both know that’s code for “I don’t want to admit to myself that I’m scared to do this, afraid I’ll look like an idiot, and so I’m going to use the excuse of being too busy and put it off indefinitely, hopefully forever.” Look at this as an opportunity, not an obligation. Need some reasons why this is an opportunity? Here are 10.
If you’re a CEO who doesn’t tweet, you’re obviously not alone. You’re in the vast majority. If you’re comfortable following the crowd, then there’s no reason to keep reading this post. But if, like me a few months ago, you’ve become uneasy about your lack of acumen when it comes to social media, I’ve created a simple guide to getting started with social media, from one CEO to another. Note that this is not a definitive guide on how CEOs can become social media experts. This is how you dip your toes in and get started.
LinkedIn. The easiest social network for CEOs to use and appreciate. Get started here by creating a full profile, connecting with those you know, and joining groups that are interesting to you. At least once a week post something to the LinkedIn homepage. It can be an article (along with your brief comments on it) or just your thoughts by themselves. Ask questions. Invite feedback. Read The Startup Of You by Reid Hoffman, one of LinkedIn’s founders. Twitter. After LinkedIn I would focus on Twitter. I found it difficult to get started on Twitter, but easier to use once I got used to it. Don’t want to look stupid asking for advice? Check out Michael Hyatt’s Beginner’s Guide to Twitter. Once you’ve set up your account create a schedule for tweeting by inserting a reminder in your calendar. Tweet once a day. It’s only 140 characters, it won’t take much of your time. Retweet interesting posts from people you follow. And by the way, follow a lot of people--anyone whose opinion you respect. Commit to using Twitter at least once a day for a month. I resisted Twitter for years, but one week of being committed to using it was all it took to make me an addict. Facebook. As a CEO, think of Facebook as a bit of LinkedIn and Twitter combined. Sure, there’s more to it than that, but that’s enough to get you started. Google+. “Ah, geez, do I have to?” Yes. HootSuite’s CEO Ryan Holmes says Google+ is sneaking up on Facebook, and as a recent convert to Google+ I believe him. It’s not quite there yet, in my opinion, and it lacks the active network Facebook has, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Google+ ends up being a Facebook-killer. Pinterest. I’ll confess, I’m not very active on Pinterest...yet. It’s on my to-do list. I’ve dabbled with it, but more for personal reasons than for business. If that’s all you have time to do, at least get started that way. Then start reading resources on doing business on Pinterest. As the article says, “One of the biggest mistakes marketers make is that they don’t create enough original content.” This is an area where you can enlist the help of your marketing team. Have them create content for you, then you post it with your authentic comments. Or share visuals related to the operations of your business. Did you just set up a new office? Pin pictures of it. New product? A photo of every product you sell should be posted to Pinterest with a link to where it can be purchased. Instagram. Don’t use Instagram the way you might use Pinterest. Social media consultant Lisa Parkin advises businesses to start out listening with Instagram, rather than talking. That’s sound advice. By the way, you need to be using a mobile device to sign up, unless you want to get fancy. Goodreads. I’m a firm believer in the Charlie Jones quote ““Five years from today, you will be the same person that you are today, except for the books you read and the people you meet.” I’m nose down in anywhere from 5 to 10 books at any given time, and anyone who knows me knows I love to talk about books, recommend books, and give books as gifts. Goodreads is a social network custom made for bookophiles like me, and it allows me to connect with business associates, employees, and clients on a very personal level. Just set up an account, connect with your Facebook friends, and start adding books you’ve read.
I could talk about Reddit, StumbleUpon, and another 50 social media websites, but I consider the above to be the basic ones any CEO new to social media should start with. If you’d like more ideas about how you can be active on these websites I recommend the excellent book Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World by Michael Hyatt. It was reading Hyatt’s book that got me active on Twitter. In less than two months I’ve doubled my number of Twitter followers from around 400 to over 800. More importantly, I’m now having stimulating and important conversations via Twitter that are helping my business and my writing.
Are you a CEO who is active on social media? What tips can you pass along?
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802b3351e9d1305f6edbb09e9a0e2d84 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshsteimle/2013/10/20/3-lessons-trail-running-taught-me-about-entrepreneurship/ | 3 Lessons Trail Running Taught Me About Entrepreneurship | 3 Lessons Trail Running Taught Me About Entrepreneurship
Photo Courtesy Jody McIntyre
I haven’t been trail running for long. I barely consider myself a runner of any sort. Up until my early 30s I had never run over a mile in my life, nor did I have any desire to. But in 2007 I hit rock bottom physically as a result of sitting in front of a computer 80 hours a week, and decided I needed to take drastic measures.
I started doing small triathlons, then larger ones, then half marathons, marathons, and last year I discovered the joy of trail running in the hills and mountains around Draper, Utah. When I moved to Hong Kong in June, 2013 I wasn’t sure I would be able to continue the practice, but serendipitously we settled into a small, rural village where I can be on any one of a number of mountain trails within a few minutes. Two days ago as I was running (err, slowly plodding) up a mountain trail on South Lantau Island in Hong Kong, I thought back on some of the lessons I’ve learned from my last year trail running that have been instructional for my pursuits as an entrepreneur.
1. The top is often farther than it looks. Anyone with experience hiking, mountain climbing, or trail running in the mountains has had the experience of seeing what appears to be the top of the mountain close at hand. Many times I’ve made that final push, only to come around a bend in the trail and instead of seeing the top, seeing more trails winding upward. When I started my online marketing firm in 1999 I assumed I would be a millionaire within a year or two. It was the dot-com boom and the rules of reality seemed suspended indefinitely. But it didn’t happen. In 2003 my company was acquired, and it looked like I would come out of the deal quite well. But then the company that bought us out went bankrupt and was delisted from the NASDAQ. The stock they had given me for my company was worthless. Time and again I’ve set goals for one thing or another, only to think I’ve arrived and see that there is more work to be done and farther to go.
2. Slow and steady wins the race. Sometimes entrepreneurship involves sprinting. But in my experience more often than not it’s an endurance sport. In the book Great By Choice by Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen, which I happened to be listening to on my trail run two days ago (I absolutely love the triple-speed feature of the Audible.com app on my phone), the authors explore the concept of the “20 Mile March.” This concept is most aptly understood using the example the authors cite of Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott, in their simultaneous efforts to be the first to reach the South Pole in 1911. Amundsen succeeded, quite handily. Scott reached the Pole 30 days after Amundsen, and then tragically died, along with his entire team, on the return trip.
Much has been made of the differences between the two parties, including matters of planning, preparation, and training. One key difference between the two was that Amundsen kept his men to a 20 mile per day march, regardless of conditions, while Scott pushed his team hard on good days, and huddled in a tent on bad days. I’ve learned firsthand that the fastest way to a make a long trail run a short one is to start the run out by sprinting. One or two sprints and I’m in no position to run another half hour, let alone an hour or two. But if I set a consistent, easy pace, I can run three or four hours without too much discomfort. Likewise, if I increase the time and distance I run per day, week, or month too quickly, I end up injured. But if I slowly increase the time and distance I run, I can work up to 20+ mile runs without much difficulty.
With my business the times when I have moved forward at a slow and steady pace I’ve done well. Every time I’ve tried to sprint forward without adequate planning, preparation, or resources, I’ve ended up “injured” and have had to slow down or even backtrack. In many cases I’ve had to recommit to my goals, or change them altogether. Which brings us to Lesson #3.
3. Love the journey, not just the destination. Reaching the top of a mountain is exhilarating. But I couldn’t reach the top if I hadn’t learned to enjoy the process of getting there. For me, every step is enjoyable, especially if I’m exploring new terrain. I’m sure I would enjoy standing on top of a mountain after being dropped off by a helicopter as much as I would enjoy someone handing me a million dollars. But I know I enjoy being on top of a mountain much more when I’ve climbed it myself.
With money, one benefit of earning it is not just that it is more enjoyable, but that one’s attitude toward it changes. For me, the process of being an entrepreneur has changed my mind about money and its allure. Don’t get me wrong, I still wouldn’t mind making a few million dollars, but today that goal in and of itself seems a bit shallow, especially as I’ve had the chance to interview founders of social ventures. Today, if I had to choose between making money and changing the world, I hope I would choose the latter.
As a bonus lesson, I’ve learned that sometimes the destination changes, and that’s ok. I might leave my house planning to run in one direction and get to a certain place, but as I run I frequently change my mind. I decide to explore a new path, or take a closer look at a landmark I hadn’t noticed before. In my business the choices I’ve made haven’t always led to the tops of the tallest mountains, but the paths I’ve gone down have been fun, educational, and interesting. Perhaps having those types of experiences makes for a better destination than the one that is merely financial.
Are you a trail runner and entrepreneur? What has trail running taught you about running your business?
Connect with Joshua:
Google+ | @donloper | Facebook | Linkedin | Goodreads | Medium
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f1793a905be660420ec8cb2c5fc28879 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshsteimle/2013/10/30/hong-kongs-startup-office-spaces/ | Hong Kong's Startup Office Spaces | Hong Kong's Startup Office Spaces
Wynd co-Founders Michael Ma and Rick Lam
In the space of 2 to 3 years, Hong Kong has become a hotbed of startup activity. But startups need a place to live and grow, and Hong Kong’s astronomical real estate prices don't provide the most conducive habitat for cash-strapped entrepreneurs. Enter the co-work space and/or virtual office. The co-workspace and virtual office industry in Hong Kong was started by local entrepreneur Jon Buford who started a small office under the name BootHK that housed a few startups. Today that industry includes more than 10 companies operating from 30+ locations containing hundreds of thousands of square feet of flexible, short-term office space.
I moved to Hong Kong to open a branch office of my online marketing firm in June, 2013. My firm is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah where the co-work phenomenon is just starting to blossom in select areas. Traditionally startups in Utah and many other parts of the United States had four options when it came to housing a startup; 1) rent traditional office space for several thousand dollars per month, 2) rent a virtual office ala Regus for several hundred or a thousand dollars per month, 3) get into one of the rare local incubator programs that provides free office space, or 4) work from home. Stateside there is a large gap between working from home and outfitting any sort of office. That is changing, but in Hong Kong it’s already here and growing quickly. Many of the companies I interviewed for this article have expanded their co-work and virtual office spaces far beyond what they started with a year or two ago and are looking to add locations.
In Hong Kong the term “virtual office” often has a different connotation than in the US. Whereas a virtual office in the US tends to mean one gets an actual private office, secretarial services, and use of conference and break rooms, in Hong Kong a virtual office might consist of nothing more than a mailing address and phone number. This is what I used to launch the Asia office for my own firm. As more services are needed they can be added a la carte, providing an affordable, flexible service for entrepreneurs. Startups and companies expanding into Hong Kong get what they need, when they need it.
Many of the virtual office companies in Hong Kong also offer co-working space where for as little as $50 USD per month an individual can walk into the space, sit at a common area desk, plug in a laptop, and get to work. It’s no frills, but that’s just fine with entrepreneurs who only want to pay for what they need.
Below is a partial list of the virtual office and co-working spaces in Hong Kong. This list is not comprehensive, as new spaces are coming on line almost every week. What this list represents is a sampling of those companies that are doing the best job catering to entrepreneurs and startups. If I were moving my business to Hong Kong or doing a startup here, these are the places I would consider putting my team.
Note: Differences in pricing represent a considerable variety of options provided by the different companies listed. One company may only offer "hot desk" options wherein a member can take whatever seat is open and work there for the day, whereas others are offering office space suitable for a team of 10+ individuals. Please consult each company’s website for specifics.
Cocoon
Founded: 2012 Locations: 1 Residents: 100+ Size (sq ft): 14,000 Rates (monthly): Start at $250/month, per person Website: http://www.hkcocoon.org/
Cocoon is unique in that it has its own incubation program and companies must apply and be accepted in order to use the space. There is a strong sense of community, fostered by startup pitch nights and other networking events that bring investors and entrepreneurs together. The space is bright and fun, with many of the accoutrements one might expect of a tech startup in Silicon Valley. A good fit for an entrepreneur looking to start from scratch, put together a team, and get funding.
Compass Offices
Founded: 2009 Locations: 21 across 4 countries Residents: Thousands Rates (monthly): $44 to $350 Website: www.compassoffices.com
For the established company establishing a branch office in Hong Kong, Compass might be the best fit. Compass is all business, providing upscale, professional environments with flexible plans that grow as your business grows. Compass has several locations throughout Hong Kong as well as other countries in Asia and is therefore especially convenient for a company opening multiple branch offices at once, or for the professional who needs to meet with clientele in Hong Kong, Japan, or Singapore, but only wants to deal with one company for conference rooms, office space, etc. Compass understands entrepreneurs, but also houses established companies like Linkedin.
Cyberport
Founded: 2009 Locations: 2 Residents: 200+ Rates (monthly): $100 to $515 Website: http://www.cyberport.hk
Cyberport is like nothing else in Hong Kong. It is a gigantic technology campus housing the largest ISP in Hong Kong, as well as regional offices for enterprises like IBM, Cisco, and Microsoft. This might not sound like the environment for a startup, but Cyberport also has an entrepreneurship center, an incubation program, and cutting-edge facilities for digital and technology startups with specific needs like video and audio studios, high-end editing equipment, or direct access to Hong Kong’s Internet hub. If I were starting the next Facebook and wanted a place in Hong Kong where I could grow my team from 1 to 1,000, all under the same roof, this would be the spot. Cyberport has two locations for startups on their campus in their SmartSpace branded offices.
The Good Lab
Founded: 2012 Locations: 1 Size (sq ft): 18,000 Residents: 100+ Rates (monthly): $50 to $375 Website: goodlab.hk
The Good Lab was founded to support the local social entrepreneurial ecosystem in Hong Kong. It boasts a large meeting space, and is tied into the larger startup community. It is one of the few co-work spaces located across the harbor from Hong Kong Island and provides easy access for startups looking to escape the busy center of Hong Kong.
HK Commons
Founded: 2011 Locations: 2 Size (sq ft): 30,000 Residents: 60+ Rates (monthly): $128 to $710 Website: www.hkcommons.com
HK Commons is a one-stop shop for entrepreneurs. It offers co-work space, virtual office services, and general business consulting services. The team there is currently advising me on the increasingly complex IRS regulations for US entrepreneurs like myself doing business overseas. The space is clean, simple, and minimalist, with no long-term obligations and transparent pricing and services, but it’s the team, headed by founder and reformed Wall Street lawyer Jong Lee, that delivers the hidden value. Jong is also the curator of TEDx Hong Kong. You might want to start your business here just to have access to Jong and his expertise.
The Hive
Founded: 2012 Locations: 1 Size (sq ft): 10,000 Residents: 150+ Rates (monthly): From $360 Website: www.thehive.com.hk
The Hive has great spaces and a thriving community, and also houses many business networking events, often co-hosted by the disruptive education startup General Assembly. It’s not just a space to work in, it’s a space to network and build a business. One of The Hive’s members produces a phone gadget and was looking for someone who could produce a very fine metal part. It happened that another member specializes in fine metal parts production and the two members were able to work out a deal. Then the founder was able to find another Hive member to handle distribution. This is representative of the value these co-work spaces can provide beyond merely a place to put a computer.
Innovation Labs
Founded: 2012 Locations: 1 Size (sq ft): 8,000 Residents: 20+ Rates (monthly): $260 to $515 Website: http://innovationlab.hk/
For Innovation Labs location is a key differentiators. Uniquely situated on the Western side of Hong Kong Island in Kennedy Town, dubbed “Hong Kong’s Latest Expat Hot Spot” by the Wall Street Journal, Innovation Labs provides private spaces large enough to house companies with several employees as well as co-work space for individuals or smaller teams.
Wynd
Founded: 2013 Locations: 1 Size (sq ft): 2,500 Residents: 20 Rates (monthly): $309 to $670 Website: http://www.wynd.hk/
Having opened just one month ago, Wynd is the newest co-work space in Hong Kong and is conveniently located in the heart of Hong Kong in its Central district. It offers a quiet, clean, and very nicely designed environment to work in. I happen to be putting the finishing touches on this post while sitting in their offices, enjoying the 100MB Internet connection. The founders are very much focused on assisting their members and supporting the entrepreneurial community. Their first client? Transportation startup Uber.
Have you used a co-work space or virtual office service in Hong Kong or elsewhere? What was your experience like? How could it be better?
Connect with Joshua:
Google+ | @donloper | Facebook | Linkedin | Goodreads | Medium
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feaef14be69986375029c9a8f08c8f62 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshsteimle/2013/10/31/how-i-doubled-my-twitter-followers-in-three-months/ | How I Doubled My Twitter Followers In Three Months | How I Doubled My Twitter Followers In Three Months
Over the past three months I doubled the number of my Twitter followers (without buying any). In this post I detail what I did, why it worked, and how you can do the same. But first, some backstory and the answer to the question “Why would I want more Twitter followers?”
I will confess that prior to a few months ago, I was almost completely inactive on Twitter. I had my account, and I had some services that were auto-posting content to it whenever I updated my blog, but I didn’t use Twitter in any truly social or substantive way. That changed when I read Michael Hyatt’s book Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World.
Self-Promotion. It’s Ok.
Hyatt’s book is the go-to manual for self-promotion. If you’re uncomfortable engaging in self-promotion then you might be confusing egomaniacal self-promotion with service oriented self-promotion. It’s the difference between Mao (or insert just about any politician's name here) and Jesus. If you have something to share that will make the world a better place then you have a moral obligation to promote yourself and your product or service and you shouldn’t be ashamed to do it. That, amongst other reasons, is why you want more Twitter followers.
(Credit: iStock)
The Experiment
In Platform and on his website Hyatt extols the virtues of Twitter and the mutually beneficial relationships it can create. He also provides his own 12 suggestions for how to get more Twitter followers. After reading Hyatt’s advice, I decided to give myself a challenge. Despite being something of an anti-social CEO, I would force myself to use Twitter and make the best of it. I wanted to truly engage people and see if there were compelling reasons to use the service. I called this exercise The Platform Experiment. Because any other metric would require more work than I might be inclined to follow through on, I chose doubling the number of my followers as the goal, even though my real goal was to provide and receive value from Twitter.
I started the experiment on July 17th, 2013 with 504 followers and the goal to double that number by the end of October. I knew there were shortcuts to the goal, like buying Twitter followers, or following 50,000 other Twitter users with the knowledge that a certain percentage would follow me back, but I avoided these spammy tactics because they don’t support my real objective. I made it a rule that I would only follow people I was interested in. Then I dove in. Here’s what I did, and what worked best for me.
Twitter links everywhere. First, I made sure it was easy for people who are already using Twitter to connect with me. I put Twitter icons and links everywhere it made sense--on my blog, my various online profiles, and in the byline of articles I wrote. Improved bio. When I started the experiment my bio started out with “CEO of MWI, an online marketing firm.” Halfway through I realized the only people who know what MWI is are the people who already know me, and everyone else could care less if I’m the CEO of some company they’ve never heard of. I modified my bio to start with “Contributor to Forbes…” and immediately saw an uptick in the number of people following me. Authentic posting. I’ve never used a service to write my tweets for me, but I used to connect my blog to my Twitter account so that when I posted a blog, it would automatically post a link to my Twitter account. I no longer do that--everything on my Twitter account is placed there manually. I do this because I want complete control over what I put in each tweet, and I want the content to matter. Turning off auto-posting forces me to write each tweet and think about what I’m saying. Sociability. It is called a “social” network, after all. Of everything I did, the #1 factor in increasing the number of relevant, high quality connections with other Twitter users was being social. That meant sharing quality content and engaging in conversations. I started out with the goal posting on Twitter at least once a day. Turns out that it’s harder than you might think to write 140 characters every single day. But even though I fell short of that goal, when I did post, favorite, and retweet, I saw new people start to follow me almost every single time.
During the experiment I utilized some tools that helped me to to be more social. I tried out many tools and some of them I’ve continued to use while others have fallen by the wayside. I may return to some that I’ve dropped, like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite, but the two below are those I’ve grown to love due to their ease of use and the value I can derive from them without investing too much time.
Tweepi helps me quickly find people to follow. I could do most of the same things Tweepi does for me using Twitter itself, but it would take me 20 times as long. It costs $15/month for the premium version but has been well worth it for me. Buffer makes it easy for me to share not just on Twitter, but on all my social network accounts. It also automatically spaces out my posts, so if I’m sitting on a bus reading through a block of articles, they don’t all get posted at once, but are spaced out. Yes, I think the $10/month paid upgrade is worth it. TwitterCounter is drop-dead easy analytics for your Twitter account. If you’re like me, you’re struggling just to tweet consistently and the idea of adding analytics to pay attention to might sound like too much to put on your plate but at least give it a try. One of the stats I can see from my TwitterCounter account is that there is definitely a correlation between how much I tweet and how many new followers I get.
The Results
I easily doubled my followers within three months, with the current count standing at 1229. Given that some Twitter personalities have tens or hundreds of thousands of this might not sound like a difficult feat, and that’s my point--it wasn’t. It was easy, and that’s why you can do this too.
The Challenge
Try Twitter for 30 days for at least 10 minutes per day. Make it part of your daily routine. Ignore all the tools if you find them overwhelming. Just start tweeting. Pick an area of focus. Start posting about it. Post your thoughts, post interesting articles related to that topic. Follow those who focus on related topics or the same one. Respond to their tweets. Retweet what they’re saying. After you do the challenge, come back here and let us know how it goes. If your experience is like mine you’ll develop new relationships that are beneficial to you and your business and well worth the small time investment. Those are the metrics that really matter.
What tools do you use alongside Twitter? How do you use Twitter effectively for your business?
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cd414a08510ffc2ab9694a29a8b7992b | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshsteimle/2014/01/16/seo-how-to-avoid-the-big-ripoff/ | SEO: How To Avoid The Big Ripoff | SEO: How To Avoid The Big Ripoff
I love referring business to my competitors. I do this frequently because my agency is not the right fit for every type of client, and my goal is to help those who need SEO services find them, even if it means sending them elsewhere. I also don’t like to criticize competitors. When a potential client asks me what I think about a competitor, even if I think my firm is the better fit, I prefer the approach, “I’ve heard great things about so and so; they seem to do a great job. Here’s why our clients hire us…” However, there are some companies out there claiming to do SEO that aren't just incompetent, but are complete scam operations. Too many people are getting ripped off. You can avoid the big SEO ripoff by following these three simple tips.
(Photo: iStock)
Don’t Respond To Unsolicited Emails
I get 20 or so emails each day selling me on SEO services, despite the fact I run an online marketing firm. Due to experience, it takes my brain about 0.001 of a second to recognize them for what they are--automated spam. I don’t know who responds to these emails, but apparently someone does, or they’d stop sending them. Here’s an example of one I received recently, along with my comments in [brackets]. I've changed the name of the emailer, just in case there's a 0.0001 chance it's a real person.
Hi, I am Amit, SEO Consultant. [The from: line of the email did not match what the emailer said his name was.] I hope you are doing well and have time to read my proposal. [Apparently I do.] Advertising in this online world is one of the most inexpensive and highly effective methods of promoting a business. [This is true.] We are a Leading Indian Based SEO & Web Development Company and one of the very few companies which offer organic SEO Services with a full range of supporting services such as one way themed text links, blog submissions, directory submissions, article writing and postings, etc. [By “very few” I’ll assume he means any number under five million since, as I mentioned, I receive around 20 of these emails per day.] We are a team of 85+ professionals which includes 28 full time SEO experts. We are proud to inform you that our team handled 180+ SEO projects and obtained 100000+ manually built links in the past 3 year. [More on this later.] Let me know if you are interested and I’ll present you with a proposal that would not only improve sales of your company but also brand your products. Feel free to contact me in case of any enquiry. Kind Regards Amit Online Consultant Note: We are not spammers and are against spamming of any kind. If you are not interested then you can reply with a simple "NO",We will never contact you again. [Ha!]
The thing to understand is that there is no Amit in India who sent me, or you, an email. These emails are sent out by a computer program that sends millions of them out every month, hoping that one of a million people will respond. Don’t do it.
Beware Amazing Promises About Link Building
When you start learning about SEO, one of the first things you’re told is that Google puts a lot of weight on the incoming links pointing at a website. All other things being equal, the more links one has pointing to their site, the better. A few years ago, this was more or less true. As a result, companies in low wage countries like India and China hired hundreds of link builders and promised to build thousands of links every month for a few hundred dollars. Quantity was the focus, rather than quality.
This does not work anymore. Over the past two years Google clamped down hard on the practice of building large quantities of low quality links. Companies that invested for years and hired SEO firms to build thousands upon thousands of links to their sites are now being penalized, seeing their rankings disappear and their traffic drop to a fraction of what it once was. The solution is to contact all the websites where those links are located and request that they be removed, and then use the Google link disavowal tool to neutralize what’s left. This is time consuming work. Clients that come to my firm can expect to pay between $5,000 and $10,000 for us to clean up their bad incoming links, depending on the quantity.
It’s understandable that a lot of companies would find themselves in this position. The tragedy is that companies are still being suckered into signing up with SEO firms that build low quality links. Just recently I was pitching a client on our link building services and his response was “For that price I can go hire a whole team of guys in China to build links for us.” Another client came to us within the past week, and when we gave him a proposal his response was that he was paying a fraction of what we were asking compared to his existing firm. The company he was working with, he told me, was charging him approximately $1,000 per month for “around 20 articles in PR 3-4 sites/blogs, 40 directory submissions in PR 4 directory sites and 10-20 social bookmarking sites.”
I knew right away that he was being ripped off. These numbers are simply outrageous. You can’t buy 20 high quality articles for $1,000, and whenever an SEO company talks a lot about PR (PageRank) you can be sure they’re behind the times. Just ask Dave Davies, who penned this article Why PageRank Doesn’t Matter back in 2012.
I asked the client to send us a list of the links the SEO company he was using was building for him, and sure enough, when we examined it the links we saw were, as my SEO manager described them, “awful.” It wasn’t just that he was paying good money and getting nothing in return, but that he was paying thousands of dollars and the SEO company he had retained was doing very real damage to his site. He is now worse off than when he started, and will have to pay just to get back to where he was before he did any SEO.
Get Educated
I don’t blame clients for signing up for these harmful services any more than I blame myself if I get ripped off by an auto mechanic. It’s the service provider who is at fault. But as the saying goes, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. If you want to avoid getting ripped off by unscrupulous or behind-the-times SEO firms, which likely make up the greater portion of the industry, you have to get educated about online marketing, at least to some degree. Here are some articles, written by myself and others, to get you started:
How To Hire The Right Type Of SEO Firm What Does SEO Cost? SEO Rankings Tanking? Check For Bad Incoming Links 7 Ways SEO Consultants Rip Off Their Clients 6 SEO Scams You Need to Check While Hiring An SEO Company How To Avoid SEO & Digital Marketing Scams 6 Tips To Not Get Ripped Off When Buying SEO Services Dirty SEO Laundry: The Seven Best Ways to Rip Off SEO Clients 5 Ways To Uncover Scammy SEO Agencies
If you take the time to read all the above articles, it’s unlikely you’ll ever be taken advantage of by an SEO firm. It will take you a good hour or more to get through them all, but isn’t that worth it to save $10,000 and several months of lost time growing your business?
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c9eb9467dd3bc3f7c222bf181f969e9a | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshsteimle/2014/12/16/why-the-best-seo-firms-dont-offer-guaranteed-results/?sh=31db759f9f8a | Why The Best SEO Firms Don't Offer Guaranteed Results | Why The Best SEO Firms Don't Offer Guaranteed Results
Hiring an SEO firm can be stressful. With prices ranging anywhere from several hundred to tens of thousands of dollars per month, depending on your specific needs, it is difficult to hear an SEO firm tell you it will take a few months before you can expect to see results. How do you know if they’re doing real work, or ripping you off? If you’ve hired an SEO firm before and had a bad experience, you have anxiety added upon anxiety as you go through the hiring process again. In these circumstances, it is perfectly understandable that you would be attracted to the idea of a guarantee. Other service businesses, from auto mechanics to shipping companies, offer guarantees, so why wouldn’t SEO firms?
As the owner of an SEO firm, I’ve been tempted to offer guarantees myself. Don’t my clients deserve a guarantee? And wouldn’t it be great for marketing? It would help those clients who are hesitant about the risk involved with SEO to decide to use us rather than a competitor who didn’t offer a guarantee, right? But several years ago when I started researching SEO guarantees, I found reasons to be hesitant about offering one myself. The first reason can be found in my spam filter, and probably in yours, too. Here's a view of what I see in mine:
Wait, Sophia Loren is into SEO and sent me an email? I'll have to look into this... But seriously, would I want to associate my firm with companies that send out this spam? This, by itself, was reason enough to think twice about offering a guarantee.
Why These Guarantees Can't Be Trusted
I also studied this post on SEO guarantees by Moz Founder, Rand Fishkin. As to why guarantees regarding SEO should not be trusted, Fishkin gives five reasons:
1. “SEO & Guarantees Have an Abominable History” - Scams offer guarantees, which by itself means you should be on your guard about any firm offering a guarantee.
2. “The Search Engines Expressly Warn Against It” - Google’s official statement reads:
No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with Google, or advertise a "priority submit" to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or by submitting a Sitemap and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.
3. “Rankings are Inherently Unstable” - Rankings for a particular keyword search can vary from one moment to another, and from one computer to another, which makes guaranteeing them a tricky proposition.
4. “Rankings are a Poor Metric for Overall Performance” - See SEO: Focus On The Only Metric That Matters for more on this.
5. “Making Guarantees About Something You Cannot Control Carries Inherent Ethical Problems” - Auto mechanics work with mass produced, predictable parts. Shipping companies, like FedEx and DHL, have turned logistics into a well-oiled machine. But search engines control rankings (not SEO firms), and therefore SEO is an inherently less predictable, less scientific service. To guarantee results is to be somewhat disingenuous from the start.
I followed up with Fishkin to ask if he would change anything about his piece, to which he responded, “I'd still write almost exactly that article, though I'd note that Moz hasn't been in the consulting business since 2009. That said, the reputable consultants I know still avoid guarantees.” Coincidentally, Fishkin just published a relevant video entitled How to Avoid the Unrealistic Expectations SEOs Often Create, which is worth viewing.
What The Experts Say About SEO Guarantees
To settle this question of SEO guarantees once and for all, I contacted several of the best SEO firms out there and got their responses to this question of SEO guarantees, and why they don’t offer them.
“Search rank guarantees are malarkey. Anxieties of the unknown are very real,” says Angie Schottmuller, Director of Optimization at Three Deep Marketing. “A good SEO agency authentically boosts customer confidence with education, clear expectations, and business goal alignment. A great SEO agency backs that up with supporting data/evidence, expert credentials, social proof, and relevant case studies. Bottom line, don't make promises your agency, track record, or content can't cash.”
Alex Houg, Founder and CEO of Portage Co., says “Offering a guarantee goes against the idea of inbound marketing. If you have to ask about a guarantee, you probably aren't ready to be a client because you aren’t financially stable enough to make the investment.” He adds this warning to other SEO firms, “Client who ask for guarantees most likely fit in the 20% bucket of clients that cause 80% of problems. Work with people that already love you and are ready to go.”
Jeffrey Eisenberg, CEO of Buyer Legends, includes a similar warning to other SEO firms. “Potential clients seeking guarantees raise two major red flags: a. their own credibility b. the nature of your relationship with them.” He continues:
In the very beginning I used to explain why we don't offer guarantees and then walked away. Until the day that I gained the confidence to ask them if they were willing to offer us mutual guarantees. I ask them for two guarantees. First, I ask them if they will guarantee to do exactly as we advise or risk pre-defined financial penalties. Second, I ask them if they'll guarantee that their customers will be so delighted with their product or service that those customers will be willing to recommend them. This is more fair, since now their performance can be quantified the same way ours is. This strategy changes the tone of the conversation considerably. The main point is for them to realize that we are equals and not supplicants begging for work. We have invested two-decades in building our reputation and you might think you cannot afford to do this. You'd be wrong, we've never made a guarantee, and we've taken this strategy from early days when nobody knew us or what marketing/conversion rate optimization was.
SEO requires effort on both the part of the client and the SEO firm, making a one-sided guarantee unwise, which is a point also made by Ian Lurie, Founder and CEO of Portent, Inc. “We don't control people,” Lurie says. “SEO requires a lot of work on a client's site. If they can't or won't make the changes we recommend, or if something else goes wrong on that site, SEO may become impossible. SEO also requires work on authority. If a client's brand takes a major blow, their SEO will suffer.” Lurie also points out that clients sometimes end up working against the SEO firms they hire. “Google's Terms of Service forbids some activities,” Lurie states. “If a client has someone else participating in those activities, with or without their knowledge, Google may penalize them.”
Lurie reiterates the point that SEOs don’t control search engines. “We don't control the algorithms,” he says, “Google makes hundreds, if not thousands, of changes to their algorithm each year. As SEOs, we can guarantee that we'll bring a site into line with best practices around visibility, discoverability, authority and audience appeal. But we don't control the little things that Google tweaks and changes, and those can impact rankings, too.”
Jordan Kasteler, Sr. SEO Manager at Red Door Interactive, says “Oftentimes, clients or prospects ask about guarantees when referencing keyword rankings.” He echoes Fishkin’s warning about focusing on rankings, saying, “This is a red flag in itself since judging SEO performance on keyword rankings is a problem within itself as keywords do not equal organic traffic. Keyword rankings fluctuate on their own due to competitor efforts, search engine algorithm updates, and are also largely personalized to one's location and history. Controlling a ranking is near impossible and search engines positions are fickle.”
“We don’t offer a guarantee when it comes to client rankings and we’re very upfront about that,” says Rae Hoffman, CEO at PushFire. “We don’t work for Google and we can’t control their algorithm. The only guarantee we can offer clients is to do the work to the best of our knowledge, to the best of our ability and with their best interests at heart.” Hoffman says, ”I’d be wary of any guarantee by an SEO firm that centers around guaranteeing Google’s algorithm will react in a certain way. In my opinion, even a Google engineer can’t guarantee that the algorithm will act a certain way six months down the line. There have been several instances where Google representatives have said they saw no issue with a certain tactic only to devalue it or demonize it later.”
“How can we guarantee something that is a moving target?” asks Wil Reynolds, Founder of SEER Interactive. “What would you do if Travelocity were a client of yours and you had guaranteed their results right before Google started showing flight information at the top of search results for airline flights?” He continues, “Sure, we can get you a ranking, but no one should be in search for rankings, we should be in the game for revenue.”
The Risks of Trusting a Guarantee
When I try to explain to potential clients why we don’t offer a guarantee, I call tell that many of them don’t want to believe me. They want to believe there is someone out there who can guarantee and deliver top rankings in the search engines. Many SEO firms take advantage of this desire, and because these firms generally offer their services at very low prices, many clients think, “Well, this guy offers a guarantee, and he’s cheap. Might as well try him out and if it doesn’t work, I haven’t lost much and I can still switch to the more expensive guy who promises better quality later. What’s the worst that could happen?” Unfortunately, when someone chooses a low quality SEO firm a lot of bad things can happen including losing your money, losing your time, losing your rankings, and perhaps earning a penalty from Google that may take a good amount of time and expense to get resolved.
An Acceptable Guarantee
Reynolds does offer one type of guarantee. “I've always told my clients, I can make a guarantee, I can guarantee that I won't hire any old slouch off the street to work on your project," Reynolds says, "I interview every SEO team member personally to this day, because while I can't guarantee the outcome for every client, I can guarantee that I care enough to get smart, passionate, dedicated people to work really hard on helping them to be successful.”
How To Hire The Right SEO Firm
While it’s understandable why it would be natural to want your SEO services to be guaranteed, the nature of the service is unpredictable to the point where guaranteed results don’t hold much meaning. When shopping for SEO services, it’s important to do your homework and follow best practices for hiring an SEO firm. You can gain greater peace of mind by looking at case studies, talking to references, and most importantly--learning more about SEO. Knowledge is the best weapon when it comes to hiring a good SEO firm and working in partnership with them to maximize results. Best of luck!
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0f9ee164882f890592051b371ea177f4 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshsteimle/2015/11/06/pivot-your-marketing-instead-of-your-product/ | Pivot Your Marketing Instead Of Your Product | Pivot Your Marketing Instead Of Your Product
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, or so the saying goes. Many entrepreneurs have become enamored with the word “pivot” over the past few years, using it as something of a badge of honor, e.g. “Yeah, we started out with a fintech SaaS offering for investment banking, but now we’ve pivoted into a healthcare app.” Using the word “pivot” is how you sound cool when admitting what you were doing wasn’t working.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with using the word pivot, but there are good pivots and bad pivots. In the business classic Think And Grow Rich, author Napoleon Hill tells the story of a miner who dug himself into debt trying to find a vein of gold he was convinced existed on his property. The vein was there, but the miner stopped digging three feet short of reaching it and left to do something else. Bad pivot.
Sometimes we assume, without considering all the options, that a pivot means changing our product. “Customers don’t like what we’re selling, so we need to sell something else,” an entrepreneur might think. But what if it isn’t that complicated? What if the solution isn't to change what you're selling, but how you're selling it? Here are three case studies of entrepreneurs who achieved success not by pivoting their products, but by making relatively small and simple changes to their marketing.
S’well
When Sarah Kauss created the S’well bottle--a dual lined, stainless steel bottle that keeps liquids warm for up to 12 hours and cold for up to 24 hours (without any condensation forming on the outside), she formed a charity partnership framework, donating a portion of proceeds. This became the primary focus of the marketing on the website, but sales weren’t as brisk as she would have liked. “Of course people liked the charitable aspect of what we were doing, but we found that it wasn’t a primary force when it came to making a decision to buy,” Kauss says. “People were buying because they loved the product.”
Sarah decided to focus on the unique design and quality of the bottle. Soon thereafter the product caught the attention of Oprah’s O Magazine and a mention there led to deals with various retailers, including Starbucks which now carries S’well products in thousands of its stores. That’s good for both S’well and the charities it supports.
(Photo: S'Well)
Ravean
Ravean is an apparel startup currently marketing its product, heated hoodies and jackets, through a Kickstarter campaign. Initially, the company marketed its products towards three broad groups: skiing, camping, and outdoor enthusiasts generally. “The response was terrible,” says co-founder Bryce Fisher. “We pivoted by making our marketing location based within these same categories, but still got a very mild response.” While lots of people were seeing online ads the company placed and visiting their Kickstarter page, very few were committing to fund the project. “We realized we had to target the people who already knew what Kickstarter was,” Fisher says. “This small change brought back 2-3X ROI on our money, and then we began to split test by age, gender, and location, raising the ROI to 5X.”
Ravean started out with a goal to raise $100,000 through their Kickstarter campaign, but as of this article going to press, Ravean has blown past that, raising over $585,000, with 23 days to go.
(Photo: Ravean)
SODO
SODO makes high end athletic clothing. The standard operating procedure for an athletic apparel company is to gather celebrity athlete endorsements to give the brand credibility and drive awareness and sales. “We believed that paid athlete endorsements would be the key that would allow us to scale rapidly, just as it had for other brands like Nike, Adidas, and Under Armour,” says Mark Nelson, founder and CEO of SODO. “We engaged a lot of pro athletes by sending them gear to try out, and we got good feedback and started negotiating endorsement contracts, but as we spoke with the athletes’ agents and attorneys we started feeling like we were losing the sense of authenticity we had gotten from the athletes when they weren’t being paid.” The SODO team started to wonder if perhaps it was a better statement of quality if they didn’t pay athletes to wear the clothing, but athletes wore it anyway.
SODO decided to change their strategy and now has over 40 pro athletes working behind the scenes to help them develop and refine the product. SODO has been able to save a lot of cash by deciding to not go down the endorsement road, yet sales are going strong with the clothing line available at select Nordstrom and REI stores, elite gyms, and the SODO Drop Shop, their mobile e-tail unit.
(Photo: SODO)
The lesson from each of these three examples is that when your business isn't finding success, look for something small and easy you can modify, rather than assuming large, disruptive changes are necessary. Perhaps the simplest change is the right one, and you're just a few feet away from striking gold.
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aa14a131dbb7b0a804e900a1a931fcd3 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshsteimle/2015/12/01/the-state-of-venture-capital-in-utah/ | The State Of Venture Capital In Utah | The State Of Venture Capital In Utah
Utah, its startup scene, and its venture capital industry have been featured in every major business publication this year. The state attracted broad attention after ranking 7th in the nation in 2014 for total seed to later stage investments, a heady achievement for a state with just 3 million inhabitants. Per capita, Utah raised more venture capital funding than New York. Utah companies raised over $800 million in 2014, more than twice the $316.2 million raised in 2013, according to a report from PwC/NVCA MoneyTree. Some of these deals were substantial, like Qualtrics raising $150 million. That has been followed up in 2015 with other large investment deals like Health Catalyst ($70 million), InsideSales.com ($60 million), and Instructure, which raised $40 million in preparation for its recent IPO which secured it over $80 million in additional funding. Based on the PwC/NVCA MoneyTree tool, Utah is looking to end 2015 with a slightly lower but still respectable $700 million or so in funding.*
(Photo: BigStock)
Why Utah?
Earlier this month Signal Peak Ventures hosted a venture capital roundtable and invited me to moderate a discussion regarding the conditions of the venture capital industry and startup scene in the state. In attendance were Jeff Burningham, Managing Director at Peak Ventures; Chris Calder, Associate at EPIC Ventures; Ben Capell, Partner at Peterson Ventures; Peter Harris, Partner at University Growth Fund; Scott Petty, Managing Director at Signal Peak Ventures; and Greg Warnock, Managing Director at Mercato Partners. Here are selected highlights from our conversation.
Moving Past Insecurity
Greg Warnock: Between 2000 and 2010 I was still feeling that to a great degree, that Utah’s entrepreneurs...lost courage after hearing the message so many times of “how can you be sizable and successful in Utah? You, of course, need to move to Silicon Valley or to some other place where you can attract a different style of talent and have a different style of leadership.” But I think we’ve sort of moved past that...
Scott Petty: Years ago there was a little bit of a mentality of entrepreneurs would do kind of the subpar exits or maybe the early exit and kind of checkout and buy the ranch or whatever, and you never saw that kind of repeat serial entrepreneurialism that you did in other markets, but I think that’s very much changed today. I see successful entrepreneurs here who are on their second, third, or fourth gig. Today I think we could all list off six, seven, eight, nine companies that have either filed, going public, or have the potential to go public, or will go public over the next six months or a year or so.
Jeff Burningham: When you have companies here like Omniture, Pluralsight, Inside Sales, Qualtrics and Vivint and those founders like Ryan Smith and Aaron Skonnard, etc. are active in the community it opens people’s eyes.
Chris Calder: Ninety percent of my friends who are VCs out in the Bay Area know Utah, they know the companies, they’re coming out here looking for deals. Every time I see them they’re asking me, “What’s the new hot deal in Utah?” I think Utah kind of has an inferiority complex that it shouldn’t have, but outside of Utah, the perception is that we have great companies, we have great valuations, we have the best inside sales force in the country.
Bubbles
Ben Capell: We’re seeing some separation amongst the deals which I think is probably reflective of bubble. The best deals are raising capital, but raising capital is getting harder for the marginal deals. A company with certain levels of metrics and certain market size — my sense is they would have had an easier time raising capital a year ago than they are today. So I do feel like things are slowing down a little bit, valuations are coming down. From 2010 to 2014, on average only one in four companies that raised seed rounds were able to get to an A round. What we’re seeing is a lot less seed financings largely because people know that that series A is a lot harder to raise. So we’re seeing the seed round get a little bit more formalized and get more aligned with the A round.
Chris Calder: Let me add to that on the series A at least. If you look at valuations over the last five years in California the median series A valuation is up almost 100% over four years ago. In Utah it’s up about 15%, so I think it’s pretty clear that there’s a bubble, but I think it’s much less so in Utah than it is in California.
Burningham: We’ve been outside of the historical range, and I think there is a reversion that’s happening, certainly in the Valley. And I think everything that happens there, it reverberates here sooner or later. But I think there are interesting dynamics in Utah which make it more sustainable. Price is one. I also feel like public markets are tamping down valuations. And so those later-stage D, E, F rounds or whatever at these crazy valuations, I think there might be a little more risk there, even than in the seed or A or earlier-stage rounds, especially maybe in Utah, where pricing hasn’t gotten as out of whack.
Warnock: The top 15% of companies in Utah are in a bubble. The rest of the market seems pretty okay to me.
Petty: Deals per year or entrepreneurs per year, they kind of don’t change. What changes is the money coming in and out of the market. There’s a lot more capital here in Utah and a lot more capital coming, a lot of firms looking from outside the state, so how do we manage that so that we don’t create our own bubble here, which we all will suffer from if it gets too big or blows up? Back in 2000, back in the vSpring and Wasatch days, entrepreneurs didn’t have a lot of choice. Either it was those firms or going out of state. Today there’s a lot more choice and a lot more opportunities, which is great for entrepreneurs and helps to properly price deals, but there’s so much money chasing a deal, how do we make sure we don’t top out on valuations and create our own bubble here?
Venture Capital Trends in Utah
Peter Harris: I feel like seed round, especially seed 2 rounds, are kind of replacing the old-school series A round. We’re raising about the same amount of money, valuations are kind of similar, and the companies tend to be at the same point as they were five years ago.
Capell: Absolutely. There’s a fundamental shift — seed is what the A was, A is the B round today.
Utah’s Challenges
Harris: What I’ve heard over the last eight years is that Utah has struggled to provide a middle-manager tier of talent and a lot of people have cited that as the reason it has struggled to grow. I think that’s changing now as we have more companies grow, go public, and we’re seeing more people develop in that middle layer and then leave and start companies. I think we’ve all seen a bunch of companies that were started by a former employee of one of the successes locally. But I think talent is still a big issue and frankly we’re still a small market.
Burningham: A threat to Utah, both entrepreneurs and investors, maybe especially investors, is this scarcity mentality. As investors we could work more closely together. The second is, and this is speaking more to entrepreneurs but also investors, is a mental ceiling on where we can go. I think entrepreneurship blows up that ceiling or that thought. I think you need to blow it up. To be the best entrepreneur you can be, you’ve got to dream as big as you can dream and then work every day to execute against that dream. I think that there have been some challenges around that, even in the investor community. The venture business is fundamentally an upside maximization business. It’s not a downside protection business.
Harris: We miss out on certain types of companies. An Instagram probably wouldn’t ever launch here or be successful or get funded or anything, right?
Calder: There are things that Utah’s good at, and there are things that we aren’t good at. We’ve never been a consumer web or consumer mobile powerhouse.
How The Utah Startup Scene Has Improved
Burningham: I think of my first startup 15 years ago and there being a handful of people that you could talk to. Those people weren’t always available. They were busy. Everyone wanted to talk to them. There’s just so many more outlets. There’s so many more people with experience and knowledge, potential investors, both institutional and angel. And the events. You can’t go to all of them, literally there’s an event every night, hosted by one of us or hosted by LaunchUp or Beehive Startups or down at the Startup Building in Provo or at the U, at BYU.
Petty: It’s very robust. If I’m an entrepreneur and I want to get a company up and running quickly, I can do that. I can find the people. I can find the support, service providers, a lot of investors that I can go to not necessarily to get money from but advice, help and so forth, whereas it certainly wasn’t quite that way several years ago. I think too the caliber of students today is just a lot higher. I always joke — I went to BYU years ago. I couldn’t even get into BYU today. I’m always amazed at the caliber of students at BYU and at the U.
Utah’s Startup Advantages
Harris: Utah has got some interesting dynamics relative to the Valley. It’s so much cheaper to start a company here. It’s much cheaper to scale up a company because labor rates are about half of what they are in the Bay Area. And then the other thing is startups are just so much easier to start in general.
Capell: Entrepreneurs in Utah care about revenue and traction because they have to, because it’s not guaranteed that the next round of funding is around the corner. You see that some of the best companies today that all the growth investors want to be in were mostly bootstrapped.
State Government Involvement
Petty: The government is staying out of the way, to a certain extent, which is good. They have been focused historically on bringing subsidiaries, divisions, call centers, whatever you want to call it, of other large companies to Utah, which again aren’t the best jobs and so forth. But I think the state has slowly refined, and they’re much more focused on organic growth, supporting what’s here, encouraging what’s going on here, and helping the local entrepreneurial venture startup community build from kind of the grassroots up and help them to celebrate what’s going on here because that’s where the real sustainable long-term value is: companies and entrepreneurs that are based here, growing jobs up and down the ladder, growing independent companies that are generating wealth for all participants, and hopefully keeping it here for the long term and not having it ripped up.
Harris: It has been really interesting is to see the governor and other people at the state level take some risks that are biased towards entrepreneurship. If you look at the whole Zenefits thing that happened. They’re not even a Utah company. They came in, there was some backlash, and the government got together and changed it and made it more friendly to disruptive technologies. I think that says a lot to the community broadly of, “Hey, look, we know that there’s going to be disruptions. There’s going to be winners and losers, but we’re going to support disruption that makes everybody’s lives better, even if that’s going to hurt interest groups that we might be deriving benefits from.”
Burningham: This is a really big benefit to Utah, something Forbes readers may not know, but the conservative nature of the government here. Generally speaking the government is favorable for business here and supporting entrepreneurship in a big way.
Capell: It’s a very business-friendly environment. You’re seeing some of the bigger companies recognize that and you’ve got the big banks here like Goldman Sachs. You’ve got the Adobes of the world, Microsoft, they all have offices here. I think the state and the government have done a good job of helping to attract those companies.
Forecast for 2016?
Harris: You’ve got several Utah companies that will go public this year, next year. We think there’s going to be a lot of people who will leave those companies and they’ll start new things and leverage that experience. We’re really excited to see more startups start next year but then also see some of the startups that several of us have funded or will fund continue to grow and do really well. I worry a little bit about some sort of market correction next year and how that might impact some of these IPOs or exits. The flip side of that is I don’t think any of these companies are going anywhere. They’re all solid businesses. They’ve got good business models.
Burningham: We own an office building in the River Bottoms in Provo. Across the street is Vivint, Qualtrics, and Ancestry, so three billion-dollar tech companies right across from us. Within 7 or 8 minutes of our office there are 60,000 students, so I’m excited and bullish because of this young talent, among many other things.
Petty: Hopefully the public market can hold up. They haven’t been holding up great, but hopefully they won’t completely shut. I think the public markets are probably pricing stuff better than a lot of private markets are. On a more micro level, I think we’re all excited about some of our portfolio companies.
Calder: I think I’ve been less worried about a correction. If you look at the “Unicorn Club” and the amount of value that’s tied up in these privately held companies, we have a 10-year backlog of IPOs — companies that should have gone public already and haven’t and are still private. And because all of that stock is illiquid and generally only gets revalued when the company raises subsequent financing, a major shift would be spread out over a long period. In that sense, I’m less worried about a correction and still really bullish. The last 18 months have been our busiest in our firm’s history, and I think we expect to keep up that pace.
Capell: We’re excited. We are recommending to our portfolio companies if you can raise capital, raise capital. We think it’s a good time to have capital cash on the balance sheet.
* Update December 2nd, 2015: After publication Barrett Edgington of Peterson Partners sent me an analysis of data from DataFox showing current funding in Utah for 2015 at approximately $817.8 million.
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3be3fafc00f38b8ab78b07f1fa2014d7 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuabrown/2011/01/13/if-every-bull-is-expecting-a-pullback-will-there-be-one/ | If Every Bull Is Expecting a Pullback, Will There Be One? | If Every Bull Is Expecting a Pullback, Will There Be One?
IT'S OFFICIAL: Everyone's a bull, but everyone is expecting a correction "at some point". Isn't that helpful?
Diogenes the Cynic wandered about ancient Athens carrying a lantern on his quest to find a single honest man. Needless to say his search was ultimately fruitless. Were he to go looking for a single bull in this market moment who wasn't getting ready for a pullback to buy, he would be equally frustrated.
The riddle I asked at the outset is a simple one: If we're all buying the dip, how many dips will there be?
I'm only half-joking of course as the market remains overbought and sentiment surveys are screaming - but we've seen this movie before and still have no confidence in when the reel ends.
What will be interesting to see is how many of these cautiously-optimistic bulls actually step up to buy that dip when it comes. History tells us that should we got through a spate of negative headlines (like the ones from this morning), a great swathe of the punditocracy will quickly drop any notion of positivity and switch over to the Comeuppance Camp. Remember all those newly-minted Double Dippers coming out of the woodwork in August of 2010 after a rough and tumble headline summer for stocks? They will be back.
In the meantime, the trend remains up. Decent S&P 500 support at 1260 is the eyeball level we're all focused on. Sentiment polls, while overheated, may merely be catching up after so much skepticism for so many months.
When the pause comes, we'll see who really buys it.
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d021c6913bf339eb7183b6236eb7c46b | https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuabrown/2011/07/20/is-gold-money/ | Is Gold Money? | Is Gold Money?
Is gold money?
That's the question Ron Paul famously asked Dr. Bernanke on the Hill last week and the question on many of your minds. Bernanke's answer, presumably inspired by a late-night viewing of Fiddler on the Roof, was that gold's value is basically "tradition". That answer was hilarious, btw.
I have a few smart aleck remarks to make here about gold, and before you guys howl at the moon and come after me, please understand that I've had gold as a part of the portfolios I manage for over four years now via ETFs and active managers with big allocations toward the precious metals.
Anyway, gold has, at times, been more like a drug than like money. The Spaniards in the 16th Century were like meth addicts for gold; their lust driving them across the oceans to slaughter millions of people in an endless quest to melt down as much of it into the shape of a cross that they could. And like all the best drugs, gold (and the pursuit of more gold) deluded the conquistadors into a sense of invincibility.
You've heard of "Beer Muscles", the phenomenon during which an intoxicated man is convinced that he can fight the entire bar? Well Gold Muscles enabled Francisco Pizarro, a very ordinary campaigner, to march a starving, bedraggled army from Panama to Peru. Upon his arrival in 1532, with only 180 men left and a handful of horses, Pizarro's gold muscles led to his conquest of 30 million Incas in half an hour - they take Emperor Atahualpa hostage and demand that the Incas bring them every shiny object in the kingdom (the entire west coast of South America) that's not nailed down.
And when that ransom is paid, they kill Atahualpa anyway - drunk on gold, high on silver.
These days, gold has morphed from being a drug into being a religion. I'm long but not religious about it. To me it's a trade. Gold is an ETF. So long as the uptrend is intact, I'm happy to be a part of it all, but I'll lose my religion faster than Michael Stipe should it feel "over-ish". Gold is a trade, a "play", a tool to express a popular theme. Not money, but a means of getting more money.
One final point, gold is not money in that where I live (earth), I can't pay for things with it. Last Thursday my friends and I went to Phillipe Chow on the upper east side of Manhattan. The bill was a few hundred bucks. My friend Dave (a big-time gold business guy) plunked down a few thousand dollars in coins on the check:
Those big ones you see there are 1-ounce minted gold coins. They are worth $1600 each at today's prices. The little ones Krugerrands, also worth quite a bit apiece.
But the bill couldn't be paid in gold -gold coins, gold bullion, Goldschlager or otherwise.
"Cash or credit, gentlemen."
In 2011, gold is not money. It's an ETF. Let's move on, shall we?
Tags: $GLD, $GDX, $GDXJ, $SLV
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fa9c3f70e7e86cacdddb5e7963ac90d1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roger-LEstrange | Sir Roger L'Estrange | Sir Roger L'Estrange
Sir Roger L’Estrange, (born December 17, 1616, Hunstanton, Norfolk, England—died December 11, 1704, London), one of the earliest of English journalists and pamphleteers, an ardent supporter of the Royalist cause during the English Civil Wars and Commonwealth period (1649–60), who was eventually rewarded for his loyalty by being appointed surveyor of the imprimery. In this position he had the power to license and control the press, and he energetically weeded out unlicensed printers who issued antigovernment propaganda.
L’Estrange was deeply implicated in an unsuccessful attempt to recapture the town of Lynn, Norfolk, from anti-Royalist forces in 1644, and he was imprisoned for four years. He later withdrew to the Netherlands. Just before the restoration of the monarchy he attacked the poet John Milton, a leading apologist for the Commonwealth, in a pamphlet called No Blinde Guides (1660), a reference to Milton’s blindness. Appointed surveyor in 1663, he also published three news sheets: the Intelligencer and the News (both 1663–66) and the Observator (1681–87), as well as numerous pamphlets in support of the government. He was knighted in 1685 after helping to discredit the Popish Plot, a fictitious story alleging that the Jesuits were planning to assassinate King Charles II.
The Glorious Revolution (1688–89), in which King James II lost the throne, cost L’Estrange his official post. Accomplished in languages, he afterward supported his wife and himself chiefly by translations of many standard authors, including the lively Fables of Aesop, and other Eminent Mythologists: with Morals and Reflexions (1692).
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20351b23993fe13891d355305372f2b7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roger-Maris | Roger Maris | Roger Maris
Roger Maris, in full Roger Eugene Maris, (born Sept. 10, 1934, Hibbing, Minn., U.S.—died Dec. 14, 1985, Houston, Texas), professional baseball player whose one-season total of 61 home runs (1961) was the highest recorded in the major leagues until 1998. As this feat was accomplished in a 162-game schedule, baseball commissioner Ford C. Frick decreed that Maris had not broken Babe Ruth’s record of 60 home runs (which was set during a 154-game schedule in 1927) because Maris hit only 59 home runs in the first 154 games of the season. Not until 1991 was Maris recognized without dispute as the official record holder. Maris’s record stood until Sept. 8, 1998, when Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals hit his 62nd home run of the season. (McGwire eventually hit 70 home runs that year.) See Researcher’s Note: Baseball’s problematic single-season home run record.
Maris entered the major leagues with the Cleveland Indians in 1957. From 1960 through 1966 he played for the New York Yankees, Ruth’s former team; like Ruth, Maris was an exceptional defensive outfielder as well as a powerful hitter. Maris won the Most Valuable Player award for the American League in 1960 and 1961. He retired with a career total of 275 home runs after playing for the Cardinals in 1967 and 1968.
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a1884696e443857b4923eca4d98d690e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roger-Milla | Roger Milla | Roger Milla
Roger Milla, in full Albert Roger Milla, original name Albert Roger Miller, (born May 20, 1952, Yaoundé, Camer.), Cameroonian football (soccer) player, renowned for his impeccable technique and grace under pressure. A forward, he starred on the Cameroon national team that became the first African squad to reach the quarterfinals of the World Cup. He was twice named African Player of the Year (1976, 1990).
The young Milla’s skill and imagination drew the attention of the Éclair club of Douala, who signed him as an amateur in 1965. He later joined the Leopards of Douala (1970–72), with whom he won his first national championship in 1972. Having moved to Tonnerre of Yaoundé (1972–78), he had a terrific year in 1975, scoring the winning goal in the Cameroon Cup final and playing a leading role in the club’s victorious campaign in the first African Cup Winners’ Cup. Milla moved to France and played with Valenciennes (1978–79), AS Monaco (1979–80), Bastia (1980–84), Saint-Étienne (1984–86), and Montpellier (1986–89). At Bastia he scored a fantastic goal in the team’s victory in the 1981 French Cup final; he also won a French Cup in 1980 with Monaco. He ended his club career in 1990 after a season with Saint-Pierre in Réunion.
In the 1980s and ’90s Milla and Cameroon’s national team, known as the Indomitable Lions, became world famous. He was the leading scorer in the two African Cup of Nations victories claimed by Cameroon in 1984 and 1988. He played in the 1982 World Cup finals, when Cameroon earned international respect after a superb performance in the tournament. At the 1990 World Cup, 38-year-old Milla, playing as a substitute, scored four goals and led Cameroon to the quarterfinals. Milla’s celebration dance after his winning goal against Colombia—a kind of shimmy performed near the corner flag—inspired imitations by goal scorers throughout the football world. Coming out of retirement for the 1994 World Cup, Milla, then 42 years old, became the oldest player to score a goal in the World Cup finals.
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0a9db57efe5b1fc4a0b90941306840b1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roger-Moore | Roger Moore | Roger Moore
…Sean Connery in the 1960s, Roger Moore in the ’70s and ’80s, and Pierce Brosnan in the ’90s, and Bond remained effectively ageless throughout those decades. However, as Daniel Craig took up the role with a new adaptation of Casino Royale (2006), the character’s history was formally restarted, establishing him…
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8638a9879a72284015a8595f2e84690f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roger-Mortimer-1st-Earl-of-March | Roger Mortimer, 1st earl of March | Roger Mortimer, 1st earl of March
Roger Mortimer, 1st earl of March, (born 1287?—died Nov. 29, 1330, Tyburn, near London, Eng.), lover of the English king Edward II’s queen, Isabella of France, with whom he contrived Edward’s deposition and murder (1327). For three years thereafter he was virtual king of England during the minority of Edward III.
The descendant of Norman knights who had accompanied William the Conqueror, he inherited wealthy family estates and fortunes, principally in Wales and Ireland, and in 1304 became 8th Baron of Wigmore on the death of his father, the 7th baron. He devoted the early years of his majority to obtaining effective control of his Irish lordships against his wife’s kinsmen, the Lacys, who summoned to their aid Edward Bruce, brother of King Robert I of Scotland, when he was fighting to become king of Ireland. In 1316 Mortimer was defeated at Kells and withdrew to England, but afterward, as King Edward II’s lieutenant in Ireland (November 1316), he was largely instrumental in overcoming Bruce and in driving the Lacys from Meath.
In 1317 he was associated with the Earl of Pembroke’s “middle party” in English politics; but distrust of the Despensers (see Despenser, Hugh Le and Hugh Le) drove him, in common with other marcher lords, into opposition and violent conflict with the Despensers in South Wales in 1321. But, receiving no help from Edward II’s other enemies, Roger and his uncle Roger Mortimer of Chirk made their submission in January 1322. Imprisoned in the Tower of London, Roger escaped in 1323 and fled to France, where in 1325 he was joined by Queen Isabella, who became his mistress. The exiles invaded England in September 1326; the fall of the Despensers was followed by the deposition of Edward II and his subsequent murder (1327), in which Mortimer was deeply implicated.
Thereafter, as the queen’s paramour, Mortimer virtually ruled England. He used his position to further his own ends. Created Earl of March in October 1328, he secured for himself the lordships of Denbigh, Oswestry, and Clun, formerly belonging to the Earl of Arundel; the marcher lordships of the Mortimers of Chirk; and Montgomery, granted to him by the queen. His insatiable avarice, his arrogance, and his unpopular policy toward Scotland aroused against Mortimer a general revulsion among his fellow barons, and in October 1330 the young king Edward III, at the instigation of Henry of Lancaster, had him seized at Nottingham and conveyed to the Tower. Condemned for crimes declared to be notorious by his peers in Parliament, he was hanged at Tyburn as a traitor, and his estates were forfeited to the crown.
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bddf90e0c8b7fa19e671b2451f94f1bd | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roger-N-Shepard | Roger N. Shepard | Roger N. Shepard
Roger N. Shepard, in full Roger Newland Shepard, (born Jan. 30, 1929, Palo Alto, Calif., U.S.), American psychologist and cognitive scientist known for his work in multidimensional scaling, the use of spatial models to show similarities and dissimilarities between data. He received a Ph.D. from Yale University and later worked at Bell Laboratories (1958–66) and taught at Stanford University (1968–96; thereafter professor emeritus). He also examined the phenomena of “mental rotation,” a form of image transformation. He received the National Medal of Science in 1995.
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0ab521ecc56dac3505701ddd987517e8 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roger-Nash-Baldwin | Roger Nash Baldwin | Roger Nash Baldwin
Roger Nash Baldwin, (born Jan. 21, 1884, Wellesley, Mass., U.S.—died Aug. 26, 1981, Ridgewood, N.J.), American civil-rights activist, cofounder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Born into an aristocratic Massachusetts family, Baldwin attended Harvard University (B.A., 1904; M.A., 1905). He then taught sociology at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo. (1906–09), and also served as chief probation officer of the city’s Juvenile Court (1907–10) and secretary of the reformist Civic League of St. Louis (1910–17). When the United States entered World War I, Baldwin became head of the pacifist American Union Against Militarism (predecessor of the ACLU), which defended draft resisters and conscientious objectors; in 1918–19 he spent nine months in jail for refusing to be drafted. Afterward, he wandered about for a year, joining the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and finally ending up in New York City in 1920 to help found the ACLU. He was its director (1920–50) and then its national chairman (1950–55).
During Baldwin’s tenure as head of the ACLU, the organization acquired such diverse clients as teacher John T. Scopes in the 1925 Tennessee “Monkey Trial”; the Jehovah’s Witnesses, which won free-press rights in 1938; James Joyce, who had the ban lifted from his novel Ulysses; and Henry Ford, who was granted the right to distribute antiunion pamphlets. The ACLU defended persons of all persuasions, including radicals on the far left and on the far right.
In 1940 Baldwin became disenchanted with the communists and removed them from the ACLU’s board of directors. In the end he made civil rights a universal cause—a reversal of conditions in the 1920s and ’30s, when civil liberties were widely regarded suspiciously as a radical or leftist cause.
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74a462519acc35de92dd67936e4dddab | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roger-of-Wendover | Roger of Wendover | Roger of Wendover
The medieval English chronicler Roger of Wendover describes in his Flores historiarum how an archbishop from Greater Armenia, visiting England in 1228, reported that there was in Armenia a man formerly called Cartaphilus who claimed he had been Pontius Pilate’s doorkeeper and had struck Jesus on his way to…
… (under the year 1057) of Roger of Wendover (d. 1236). He recounts that her husband, in exasperation over her ceaseless imploring that he reduce Coventry’s heavy taxes, declared he would do so if she rode naked through the crowded marketplace. She did so, her hair covering all of her body…
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343dc38f4801a088b818dcc4bedab7cf | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roger-Touhy | Roger Touhy | Roger Touhy
Roger Touhy, byname The Terrible, (born 1898, Chicago—died Dec. 17, 1959, Chicago), Chicago-area bootlegger, brewer, and gambling boss during the Prohibition era.
In 1934 Touhy was convicted, on perjured testimony, of kidnapping one John “Jake the Barber” Factor in June–July 1933, a period when Factor, as it was later proved, had been hiding out to avoid extradition to England on a swindling charge. Allegedly, the Al Capone mob (then headed by Frank Nitti) had framed Touhy in order to take over his rackets.
Touhy, sentenced to 199 years, spent the years 1934–59 in Stateville Penitentiary near Joliet, Ill. (he escaped in a jailbreak in October 1942 but was caught 12 weeks later). After lengthy appeals, the federal courts deemed the kidnapping a hoax, and on Nov. 25, 1959, he was released. A few weeks later he was killed outside his sister’s home in Chicago, felled by shotgun blasts from unknown gunmen in the street. An autobiography, The Stolen Years, was published in 1959.
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b0ac5f975c4892a8af76fdbf7fb9dae2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roger-Vadim | Roger Vadim | Roger Vadim
Roger Vadim, an aspiring director, was impressed and shrewdly fashioned her public and screen image as an erotic child of nature—blond, sensuous, and amoral. In two motion pictures directed by Vadim—Et Dieu créa la femme (1956; And God Created Woman) and Les Bijoutiers du claire…
…for her relationships with director Roger Vadim and actor Marcello Mastroianni. Both relationships produced children, including actress Chiara Mastroianni, with whom Deneuve performed in several films, including the Demy-inspired musical Les Bien-Aimés (2011; Beloved) and 3 Coeurs (2014; 3 Hearts). Deneuve’s older sister, Françoise Dorléac, was also a successful actress.…
…to the French film director Roger Vadim (1965–73) and to the American broadcasting entrepreneur Ted Turner (1991–2001). Her books included the autobiography My Life So Far (2005); Prime Time (2011), a volume of advice about aging; and What Can I Do?: My Path from Climate Despair to Action (2020). The…
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32d4405b4ee7d26d0dc25ce2905a7577 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roger-Waters | Roger Waters | Roger Waters
…Jagger’s Primitive Cool (1987) and Roger Waters’s Amused to Death (1992). In 1989 Jeff Beck’s Guitar Shop won a Grammy Award for best rock instrumental performance.
July 7, 2006, Cambridge), bassist Roger Waters (b. September 6, 1943, Great Bookham, Surrey), drummer Nick Mason (b. January 27, 1945, Birmingham, West Midlands), keyboard player Rick Wright (in full Richard Wright; b. July 28, 1945, London—d. September 15, 2008, London), and guitarist David Gilmour (b. March 6, 1944, Cambridge).…
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c4bcbfaf13daea071a380f73f2176872 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roger-Wethered | Roger Wethered | Roger Wethered
…champion in 1920 and 1929; Roger Wethered, Amateur champion in 1923; and Scots Hector Thomson, Jack McLean, and A.T. Kyle.
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df3e7eefcb0dca90d2e8dd2fae56790b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roger-Wicker | Roger Wicker | Roger Wicker
Roger Wicker, in full Roger Frederick Wicker, (born July 5, 1951, Pontotoc, Mississippi, U.S.), American politician who was appointed as a Republican to the U.S. Senate from Mississippi in 2007 and was elected to that same position in 2008. He previously served in the U.S. House of Representatives (1995–2007).
Wicker attended the University of Mississippi, where he studied political science and journalism (B.A., 1973) and law (J.D., 1975). About that time he married Gayle Long, and they later had three children. While in college, Wicker became a member of the Air Force Reserve Officers Training Corps, and in 1976 he was commissioned in the U.S. Air Force. After leaving active duty in 1980 with the rank of captain, he subsequently served in the Air Force Reserve, from which he retired as a lieutenant colonel in 2004.
From 1980 to 1982 Wicker was on the staff of U.S. Rep. Trent Lott. He then served as a public defender and judge pro tempore in Tupelo, Mississippi, before being elected to the Mississippi State Senate in 1987. While serving (1988–94) in the legislature, he also worked in private law practice. In 1994 Wicker was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and took office the following year. In 2007, when Lott resigned from the U.S. Senate, Wicker was appointed to fill his seat. The following year he won a special Senate election. In 2015 Wicker became chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
While in Congress, Wicker took a strongly conservative stance on issues, particularly abortion. He introduced legislation aimed at thwarting Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, and he sponsored a bill to prohibit taxpayer-funded abortions. Wicker also was fiscally conservative, and he supported the tax cuts enacted during the administration of Pres. George W. Bush. On foreign policy, he supported both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In 2015 he was the only senator to vote against a bill amendment stating that “climate change is not a hoax.”
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413113a86ace22c42fbf48897092f229 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roger-Wolcott-Sperry | Roger Wolcott Sperry | Roger Wolcott Sperry
Roger Wolcott Sperry, (born Aug. 20, 1913, Hartford, Conn., U.S.—died April 17, 1994, Pasadena, Calif.), American neurobiologist, corecipient with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1981 for their investigations of brain function, Sperry in particular for his study of functional specialization in the cerebral hemispheres.
Sperry earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature and a master’s degree in psychology from Oberlin (Ohio) College and a doctorate in zoology from the University of Chicago in 1941. He then became an associate of Karl Lashley, first at Harvard University and then at the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology in Orange Park, Fla. In 1946 he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago and in 1954 moved to the California Institute of Technology as Hixon professor of psychobiology.
Sperry’s early research was on the regeneration of nerve fibres. He eventually became interested in brain function and undertook research on animals and then on human epileptics whose brains had been “split”—i.e., in whom the thick cable of nerves (the corpus callosum) connecting the right and left cerebral hemispheres had been severed. His studies demonstrated that the left side of the brain is normally dominant for analytical and verbal tasks, while the right hemisphere assumes dominance in spatial tasks, music, and certain other areas. The surgical and experimental techniques Sperry developed from the late 1940s laid the groundwork for much more specialized explorations of the mental functions carried out in different areas of the brain.
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8c54246a8f61bc623148036c55ece29d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roger-Y-Tsien | Roger Y. Tsien | Roger Y. Tsien
Roger Y. Tsien, in full Roger Yonchien Tsien, (born February 1, 1952, New York, New York, U.S.—died August 24, 2016, Eugene, Oregon), American chemist who was a corecipient, with Osamu Shimomura and Martin Chalfie, of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
Tsien attended Harvard University before receiving a Ph.D. in physiology from the University of Cambridge in 1977. He remained at Cambridge as a researcher until 1981, when he left for the University of California, Berkeley, and an eventual professorship there. In 1989 he became a professor at the University of California in San Diego, where he also headed a research laboratory. In 1994 he began the research that led to his Nobel honour. Tsien and his corecipients were honoured for their work in the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein (GFP), a naturally occurring substance in the jellyfish Aequorea victoria that is used as a tool to make visible the actions of certain cells. Their work with GFP opened a vast set of opportunities for studying biological processes at the molecular level.
GFP provides a visual signal that scientists use to probe protein activity, such as when and where proteins are produced and how different proteins or parts of proteins move and approach each other within a cell. In the 1960s Shimomura showed that Aequorea victoria’s green fluorescence, which had been discovered in 1955, is produced by the protein that was later named GFP. American biochemist Douglas Prasher analyzed the chromophore in GFP in the 1980s and subsequently found and cloned the gene responsible for making GFP. In 1993 Chalfie showed that the gene that instructs the cell to make GFP could be embedded in the nucleic acids of other organisms, first in the bacterium Escherichia coli and then in the transparent nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, so that they would make their own GFP. This discovery opened the possibility of using GFP in virtually any organism. Tsien then showed, beginning in 1994, that oxygen is required for GFP fluorescence and that point mutations in the gene could shift the wavelength and intensity of the fluorescence—in other words, he discovered how to make the proteins glow more brightly and in different colours. That find made it possible to study different processes in the same cell simultaneously.Tsien also helped to determine the structure of GFP and described how to use GFP and its variants to study the role and behaviour of calcium ions in living systems. He received one-third of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his expansion of the GFP’s available colour palette.
Tsien’s later research involved developing ways to use fluorescence to distinguish cancer cells from surrounding tissue and also to mark nerve cells; it was hoped that both advances would prove useful in surgery.
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Tsien received numerous honours, and in 1998 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
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1946ca8bad726fd9b8d76223505f1a4f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roland-Gerard-Barthes | Roland Barthes | Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes, in full Roland Gérard Barthes, (born November 12, 1915, Cherbourg, France—died March 25, 1980, Paris), French essayist and social and literary critic whose writings on semiotics, the formal study of symbols and signs pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure, helped establish structuralism and the New Criticism as leading intellectual movements.
Barthes studied at the University of Paris, where he took a degree in classical letters in 1939 and in grammar and philology in 1943. After working (1952–59) at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, he was appointed to the École Pratique des Hautes Études. In 1976 he became the first person to hold the chair of literary semiology at the Collège de France.
His first book, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953; Writing Degree Zero), was a literary manifesto that examined the arbitrariness of the constructs of language. In subsequent books—including Mythologies (1957), Essais critiques (1964; Critical Essays), and La Tour Eiffel (1964; The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies)—he applied the same critical apparatus to the “mythologies” (i.e., the hidden assumptions) behind popular cultural phenomena from advertising and fashion to the Eiffel Tower and wrestling. His Sur Racine (1963; On Racine) set off a literary furor in France, pitting Barthes against traditional academics who thought this “new criticism,” which viewed texts as a system of signs, was desecrating the classics. Even more radical was S/Z (1970), a line-by-line semiological analysis of a short story by Honoré de Balzac in which Barthes stressed the active role of the reader in constructing a narrative based on “cues” in the text.
Barthes’s literary style, which was always stimulating though sometimes eccentric and needlessly obscure, was widely imitated and parodied. Some thought his theories contained brilliant insights, while others regarded them simply as perverse contrivances. But by the late 1970s Barthes’s intellectual stature was virtually unchallenged, and his theories had become extremely influential not only in France but throughout Europe and in the United States. Other leading radical French thinkers who influenced or were influenced by him included the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, socio-historian Michel Foucault, and philosopher Jacques Derrida.
Two of Barthes’s later books established his late-blooming reputation as a stylist and writer. He published an “antiautobiography,” Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes), and his Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse), an account of a painful love affair, was so popular it quickly sold more than 60,000 copies in France. Barthes died at the age of 64 from injuries suffered after being struck by an automobile. Several posthumous collections of his writings have been published, including A Barthes Reader (1982), edited by his friend and admirer Susan Sontag, and Incidents (1987). The latter volume revealed Barthes’s homosexuality, which he had not publicly acknowledged. Barthes’s Oeuvres complètes (“Complete Works”) were published in three volumes in 1993–95.
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a91899d9f3f562c74427c10c9ba6d125 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roland-Michel-Barrin-marquis-de-La-Galissonniere | Roland-Michel Barrin, marquis de La Galissonnière | Roland-Michel Barrin, marquis de La Galissonnière
Roland-Michel Barrin, marquis de La Galissonnière, also spelled Roland-Michel Barin, marquis de La Galissonière, (born Nov. 10, 1693, Rochefort, France—died Oct. 26, 1756, Montereau), mariner and commandant general of New France.
La Galissonnière was the son of a naval lieutenant-general and studied at the College of Beauvais in Paris. He became a midshipman in the French navy in 1710 and, in the following year, made the first of a number of voyages on the Héros carrying supplies to Canada. Some 26 years later he commanded the same vessel in the same trade, having earlier (1734–35) served as lieutenant commander in a West Indies campaign.
Through family influence, La Galissonnière was made captain and a knight of the Order of St. Louis in 1738. Subsequently he held a variety of commands in the Atlantic and in 1747 was named commandant general of New France—in effect, governor-general of Canada. War with the British over North American holdings had been under way for three years, and La Galissonnière, like his predecessors, sought to build and keep goodwill among the First Nation tribes allied to France. It was his hope to fortify a link along the Ohio River between French Canada and the Louisiana settlements, but the British presence in much of the projected link was too great. La Galissonnière also tried to establish French settlements in Detroit and the Illinois country, but the Canadian population was too sparse to enable sending colonists in any substantial numbers.
Upon his return to France in 1749, La Galissonnière served in Paris as a commissioner to the conference seeking to resolve the French disputes with the English over colonizing North America. He became a rear admiral in 1750, and in 1754 he was given command of a naval squadron operating to protect French shipping from the Barbary pirates. The following year he was elevated to lieutenant general of naval forces.
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69ada0fecc698d6b2e1e8171fd79608d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rolf-Boldrewood | Rolf Boldrewood | Rolf Boldrewood
Rolf Boldrewood, pseudonym of Thomas (Alexander) Browne, (born Aug. 6, 1826, London, Eng.—died March 11, 1915, Melbourne, Vic., Australia), romantic novelist best known for his Robbery Under Arms (1888) and A Miner’s Right (1890), both exciting and realistic portrayals of pioneer life in Australia.
Taken to Australia as a small child, Boldrewood was educated there and then operated a large farm in Victoria for some years. He later worked in the New South Wales and Victoria goldfields as a police magistrate and goldfields commissioner. Adopting a pseudonym, he first wrote short stories, then composed his memoirs (Old Melbourne Memories, 1884), and finally wrote about 20 novels between 1878 and 1906.
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61df36b6469fa1097d42a4d8b81bec75 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rollin-Kirby | Rollin Kirby | Rollin Kirby
Rollin Kirby, (born September 4, 1875, Galva, Illinois, U.S.—died May 8, 1952, New York, New York), American political cartoonist who gave modern cartooning decisive impetus in the direction of graphic simplicity and high symbolic value.
Kirby studied painting in New York City and Paris as a young man but switched to magazine illustrating and then cartooning. Kirby made his reputation during the 18 years (1913 to 1931) he spent on the New York World, where he won three Pulitzer Prizes for cartooning (1922, 1925, 1929). He stayed with the paper when it merged with The World Telegram in 1931; and in 1939 he went to the New York Post, where he remained until 1942. His cartoons later appeared in Look magazine and The New York Times Sunday Magazine. He criticized Wall Street, New York’s political bossism, imperialism, fascism, and the Ku Klux Klan and crusaded for civil liberties, woman suffrage, and the New Deal. He invented the long-nosed, sour Mr. Dry, who became widely known as the symbol of Prohibition. Although his drawing was outstanding, he considered the idea behind a cartoon far more important than the way it was drawn. In addition to his cartoon work, Kirby wrote verse, short plays, articles, editorials, and book reviews for various newspapers and magazines.
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946723b47cf478670b9b268779eb253d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roman-Abramovich | Roman Abramovich | Roman Abramovich
…in a London court against Roman Abramovich, a former business partner and the owner of the Chelsea Football Club. Berezovsky accused Abramovich of coercing him into selling his shares in the Russian oil company Sibneft. At the time, the multibillion-dollar legal battle was the biggest private court case in British…
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cfc1764b206a09d7d9fbcb219be04bd9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roman-Ingarden | Roman Ingarden | Roman Ingarden
Still others, notably the phenomenologist Roman Ingarden, argue that the work of art exists on several levels, being identical not with physical appearance but with totality of interpretations that secure the various formal and semantic levels that are contained in it.
A Polish philosopher, Roman Ingarden, did major work in structural ontology and analyzed the structures of various works of art in its light; Hedwig Conrad-Martius, a cosmic realist at the University of Munich, worked intensively in the ontology of nature; and others made comparable contributions in other fields…
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a643ae4a8106a75c15392ebe4d19fc55 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Romano-Prodi | Romano Prodi | Romano Prodi
Romano Prodi, (born August 9, 1939, Scandiano, Italy), Italian politician who was twice prime minister of Italy (1996–98; 2006–08) and who served as president of the European Commission (1999–2004).
Prodi graduated from Catholic University in Milan in 1961 and did postdoctoral work at the London School of Economics. After serving as a professor of economics at the University of Bologna, he entered government as minister of industry in 1978. In 1996, after two productive stints as chairman of the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (1982–89 and 1993–94), he ran for prime minister. Prodi, taking advantage of Italian electoral reform, built a centre-left base of support named the Olive Tree coalition. While incumbent Silvio Berlusconi used television to campaign, Prodi made a five-month bus tour around the country, calling for more accountability in government. His consensus-building approach to government appealed to voters, and his Olive Tree coalition won by a narrow margin. Prodi was appointed prime minister on May 17, 1996.
During his 28 months as prime minister, Prodi privatized telecommunications and reformed the government’s employment and pension policies. He significantly reduced the budget deficit in order to get the country accepted into the European Monetary Union (EMU), a task that had seemed all but impossible when he took office. Disputes over the country’s proposed budget, however, resulted in the loss of support from some left-wing members of his coalition, and Prodi resigned in October 1998. The following year he was named president of the European Commission, a key institution of the European Union (EU). His appointment came after the entire 20-member commission was forced to resign amid charges of widespread fraud and corruption. During his five-year term, the EU expanded beyond its western European roots to include Malta, Cyprus, and eight eastern and central European members.
After his term as president of the European Commission ended in 2004, Prodi returned to Italian politics and in 2006 ran for prime minister. Among his campaign pledges were improving the country’s ailing economy and withdrawing troops from Iraq (see Iraq War). In the April 2006 elections, Prodi’s centre-left coalition won a narrow victory over Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right bloc. Berlusconi initially contested the results, but in May he resigned. Prodi was sworn in as prime minister later that month. His second term lasted 20 months; he resigned after losing a confidence vote in January 2008.
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1e5532a32d9ee1d0245ccf032534b1ca | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Romanus-II | Romanus II | Romanus II
Romanus II, (born 939—died 963), Byzantine emperor from 959 to 963. The son of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, Romanus was a politically incapable ruler who left affairs of state to the eunuch Joseph Bringas and military affairs to Nicephorus Phocas; Nicephorus became emperor after Romanus’ death with the help of Romanus’ widow, Theophano.
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447629687e11dcba99b809d99539628c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Romanus-III-Argyrus | Romanus III Argyrus | Romanus III Argyrus
Romanus III Argyrus, (born c. 968—died April 11/12, 1034), Byzantine emperor from 1028 to 1034.
Of noble family, he was a prefect of Constantinople when he was compelled by the dying emperor, Constantine VIII, to marry his daughter Zoe and to become his successor. Romanus showed great eagerness to make his mark as a ruler but was mostly unfortunate in his enterprises; and in his endeavour to relieve the pressure of taxation and lavish expenditure on the churches of the capital, he disorganized the finances of the state. In 1030 he resolved to retaliate against the incursions of the Muslims on the eastern frontier by leading a large army against Aleppo, but he was defeated. His drowning was supposed to have been caused by his wife.
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2802ba7e5e4791187174e823c695b7d1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Romanus-IV-Diogenes | Romanus IV Diogenes | Romanus IV Diogenes
Romanus IV Diogenes, Romanus also spelled Romanos, (died August 4, 1072, Prote, Byzantine Empire [now in Turkey]), Byzantine emperor (January 1, 1068–1071), a member of the Cappadocian military aristocracy.
In 1068 Romanus married Eudocia Macrembolitissa, widow of the emperor Constantine X Ducas. He led military expeditions against the Seljuq Turks but was defeated and captured by them at the Battle of Manzikert (1071). On his release Romanus found that Constantine X’s son had been crowned sole ruler as Michael VII Ducas. Romanus was blinded and exiled to the island of Prote in the Sea of Marmara, where he died.
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54a3f5fe81cbc6ec085f80501f984b1a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ron-Paul | Ron Paul | Ron Paul
Ron Paul, byname of Ronald Ernest Paul, (born August 20, 1935, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.), American politician, who served as a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives (1976–77, 1979–85, 1997–2013) and who unsuccessfully ran as the 1988 Libertarian presidential candidate. He later sought the Republican nomination for president in 2008 and 2012.
Paul grew up on his family’s dairy farm just outside Pittsburgh. He earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Gettysburg College in 1957 and a medical degree from Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, in 1961. He later served as a flight surgeon for the U.S. Air Force (1963–65) and the Air National Guard (1965–68). In 1968 Paul moved to Brazoria county, Texas, where he established a successful practice in obstetrics and gynecology.
Paul was inspired to enter politics in 1971 when Pres. Richard M. Nixon abolished the Bretton Woods exchange system. Paul believed that the abandonment of the last vestiges of the gold standard would lead to financial ruin for the United States. Though he was unsuccessful in his initial run for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1974, his opponent resigned before completing his term, and Paul won a special election to complete it. He lost the seat in the subsequent general election, only to regain it two years later. He chose not to seek reelection in 1984 and instead campaigned—unsuccessfully—for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate. He broke from the Republican Party to run as a Libertarian in the 1988 presidential election, ultimately winning more than 430,000 votes. He returned to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican in 1997, though his votes were often at variance with the majority of his party; for example, in the early 2000s he voted against authorizing the Iraq War and the USA Patriot Act.
Paul’s presidential campaign platform remained libertarian in spirit. It focused on free-market economics, a radical reduction in the size of government, increased privacy protections for individuals, and a reduction of U.S. participation in international organizations. Having claimed only a handful of delegates, he ended his bid for the White House in June 2008 and launched Campaign for Liberty, a political action committee. In April 2011 Paul, who was popular within the Tea Party movement, formed an exploratory committee to assess the viability of a third presidential run. The following month he formally announced his candidacy. In July 2011, in order to focus on his presidential campaign, Paul announced that he would not seek a 13th term in Congress. Although supported by a devoted and energized base, Paul was selective in the states where he actively campaigned. A second-place showing in New Hampshire was among his best performances in January 2012. He garnered a number of other second-place finishes before announcing in May that he would not campaign in the remaining states. Paul did not endorse the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, and said on the night of the general election that he believed the only winner would be the status quo. He retired from the House in January 2013, at the age of 77.
Paul’s views are outlined in Freedom Under Siege (1987), A Foreign Policy of Freedom (2007), and The Revolution: A Manifesto (2008).
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aeac35bfd8479009a9e2082e0ff43102 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ronald-Neame | Ronald Neame | Ronald Neame
…producer Anthony Havelock-Allan, and director-cinematographer Ronald Neame. The company’s initial productions—three adaptations of Coward’s stage plays—were Lean’s first solo efforts as a director. The first of these, the domestic drama This Happy Breed (1944), is today seen as hopelessly dated because of Coward’s patronizing treatment of the lower middle-class. The…
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93d8ef558a0c3dd5b48a9b8d943db110 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ronnie-Hawkins | Ronnie Hawkins | Ronnie Hawkins
…the backing group for both Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan and branched out on its own in 1968. The Band’s pioneering blend of traditional country, folk, old-time string band, blues, and rock music brought them critical acclaim in the late 1960s and ’70s and served as a template for Americana,…
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72d3be288df61db6713a8c4e52129077 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Anacletus | Saint Anacletus | Saint Anacletus
Saint Anacletus, also called Cletus, orAnencletus, (flourished 1st century ad; feast day April 26), second pope (76–88 or 79–91) after St. Peter. According to St. Epiphanius and the priest Tyrannius Rufinus, he directed the Roman Church with St. Linus, successor to St. Peter, during Peter’s lifetime. He died, probably a martyr, during the reign of Domitian.
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896eec8bd3a4454878fbf62c2bab7d2b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Andrew | St. Andrew | St. Andrew
St. Andrew, also called Saint Andrew the Apostle, (died 60/70 ce, Patras, Achaia [Greece]; feast day November 30), one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus and the brother of St. Peter. He is the patron saint of Scotland and of Russia.
In the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), Peter and Andrew—whose Greek name means “manly”—were called from their fishing by Jesus to follow him, promising that he would make them “fishers of men.” With Saints Peter, James, and John, Andrew asked Jesus on the Mount of Olives for signs of the earth’s end, which inspired the eschatological discourse in Mark 13. In The Gospel According to John, Andrew is the first Apostle named, and he was a disciple of St. John the Baptist before Jesus’ call.
Early Byzantine tradition (dependent on John 1:40) calls Andrew protokletos, “first called.” Early church legends recount his missionary activity in the area about the Black Sea. Apocryphal writings centred on him include the Acts of Andrew, Acts of Andrew and Matthias, and Acts of Peter and Andrew. A 4th-century account reports his death by crucifixion, and late medieval accretions describe the cross as X-shaped. He is iconographically represented with an X-shaped cross (like that depicted on the Scottish flag).
St. Jerome records that Andrew’s relics were taken from Patras (modern Pátrai) to Constantinople (modern Istanbul) by command of the Roman emperor Constantius II in 357. From there, the body was taken to Amalfi, Italy (church of Sant’Andrea), in 1208, and in the 15th century the head was taken to Rome (St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City). In September 1964 Pope Paul VI returned Andrew’s head to Pátrai as a gesture of goodwill toward the separated Christians of Greece.
Many Catholics participate in an Advent devotion known as the St. Andrew Novena, or the St. Andrew Christmas Novena, in which a specific prayer is recited 15 times a day from his feast day on November 30 until Christmas.
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d6b56d41f87438386e01163218671188 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Anicetus | Saint Anicetus | Saint Anicetus
Saint Anicetus, (flourished 2nd century, b. Syria?—died, Rome; feast day April 17), pope from approximately 155 to approximately 166.
Possibly a Syrian, Anicetus, the tenth successor to St. Peter, laboured to combat the errors of the heresies of Valentine and Marcion and to prevent heresies, working particularly against the Marcionites and Gnostics. Although he suffered tribulations, it is questionable whether or not he was actually martyred. During his pontificate St. Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, visited Rome (c.. 154/155) to confer with him about the controversy over the date of Easter. He allowed Polycarp to celebrate the Eucharist in his church on the Eastern date. Some believe he died a martyr, but this has not been confirmed.
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8958974e5006a2317afc3094f35dec3e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Anno | Saint Anno | Saint Anno
Saint Anno, Anno also spelled Hanno, (born c. 1010, Swabia—died Dec. 4, 1075; canonized 1183; feast day December 4), archbishop of Cologne who was prominent in the political struggles of the Holy Roman Empire.
Educated at Bamberg, Anno became confessor to the Holy Roman emperor Henry III, who appointed him archbishop in 1056. He was the leader of the party that abducted the young king Henry IV from his mother, Agnes of Poitou. Anno then seized the regency but was compelled to share it with Adalbert, the powerful archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen. In 1064 he left the court but recovered some of his former influence over Henry when Adalbert fell from favour in 1066. Anno’s most important service was at the Council of Mantua (May 1064), when he succeeded in having Alexander II recognized as pope against the antipope Honorius II, who was originally a nominee of the German court. Anno retired to a life of strict penance at the Abbey of Siegburg, which he had founded in 1064.
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0cd1c2fbd3ca7accef88c7bcf820ca77 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Anselm-of-Canterbury/The-satisfaction-theory-of-redemption | The satisfaction theory of redemption | The satisfaction theory of redemption
When Anselm left England, he had taken with him an incomplete manuscript of his work Cur Deus homo? (“Why Did God Become Man?”). After the Council of Bari, he withdrew to the village of Liberi, near Capua, and completed the manuscript in 1099. This work became the classic treatment of the satisfaction theory of redemption. According to this theory, which is based upon the feudal structure of society, finite humanity has committed a crime (sin) against infinite God. In feudal society, an offender was required to make recompense, or satisfaction, to the one offended according to that person’s status. Thus, a crime against a king would require more satisfaction than a crime against a baron or a serf. According to this way of thinking, finite humanity, which could never make satisfaction to the infinite God, could expect only eternal death. The instrument for bringing humans back into a right relationship with God, therefore, had to be the God-human (Christ), by whose infinite merits humanity is purified in an act of cooperative re-creation. Anselm rejected the view that humanity, through its sin, owes a debt to the Devil and placed the essence of redemption in individual union with Christ in the Eucharist (Lord’s Supper), to which the sacrament of baptism (by which a person is incorporated into the church) opens the way.
After completing Cur Deus homo? Anselm attended a council at the Lateran (papal palace) in Rome at Easter 1099. One year later William Rufus died in a hunting accident under suspicious circumstances, and his brother Henry I seized the English throne. In order to gain ecclesiastical support, he sought for and secured the backing of Anselm, who returned to England. Anselm soon broke with the king, however, when Henry insisted on his right to invest ecclesiastics with the spiritual symbols of their office. Three times the king sought an exemption, and each time the pope refused. During this controversy, Anselm was in exile, from April 1103 to August 1106. At the Synod of Westminster (1107), the dispute was settled. The king renounced investiture of bishops and abbots with the ring and crosier (staff), the symbols of their office. He demanded, however, that they do homage to him prior to consecration. The Westminster Agreement was a model for the Concordat of Worms (1122), which settled for a time the lay-investiture controversy in the Holy Roman Empire.
Anselm spent the last two years of his life in peace. In 1163, with new canons requiring approvals for canonization (official recognition of persons as saints), Archbishop Thomas Becket of Canterbury (1118?–70) referred Anselm’s cause to Rome. It is possible that Anselm was canonized at this time, for the Canterbury records for 1170 make frequent mention of the pilgrimages to his new shrine in the cathedral. For several centuries after his death, he was venerated locally. Clement XI (pope from 1700 to 1721) declared Anselm a Doctor (teacher) of the Church in 1720.
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