Amazon Is Becoming More Powerful Than You Realize

Amazon’s ambition goes far beyond dominating markets, says Stacy Mitchell, an economics researcher and co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “Its intention is to control the basic infrastructure that commerce runs on.”  Thus far it’s been smooth sailing for the company …

Medium.com click the link to read the rest of the story.

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The biggest tech trends of 2019, according to top experts

A new paradigm in personal computing is around the corner. That will be helped along by enabling technologies such as 5G networks, which will be stretching far and wide by the end of 2020. And, artificial intelligence will become infused in all kinds of products, allowing gadgets and services to subtly begin to anticipate our wants.

These tectonic shifts are already creating opportunity and chances for innovation.

FastCompany.com click the link to read the rest of the story.

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The Seven Deadly Sins of Networking

Most people are terrible at networking. They make the same mistakes time and again and then wonder why they feel sleazy when networking or like it’s a waste of time.

There are a few major mistakes in networking that can kill your chances of building a world-class network.  1. Going to “Networking Events” …</blockquote

FEE.org click the link to read the rest of the story.

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New Year Productivity Tips To Help You Kickstart Your Business in 2019

Instead of merely setting up ambitious goals like the ones shown above, you need to use both lead and lag measures.

Developed by Sean Covey, Jim Huling, and Chris McChesney, authors of The 4 Disciplines of Execution, lag measures track the success of your most important goals after the performance that was intended to drive them has passed.


foundr.com click the link to read the rest of the story.

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Forget New Year’s Resolutions and Conduct a ‘Past Year Review’ Instead

New Year’s resolutions. The truth is that I no longer approach them at all, even though I did for decades. Why the change? I have found “past year reviews” (PYR) more informed, valuable, and actionable than half-blindly looking forward with broad resolutions. I did my first PYR after a mentor’s young daughter died of cancer on December 31st, roughly eight years ago, and I’ve done it every year since. It takes 30-60 minutes and looks like this: …

Tim.Blog click the link to read the rest of the story.

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How to Conduct an Annual Life Review That Will Catapult You into the New Year

For the last three years, I’ve carved out time at the end of the year to conduct a comprehensive annual life review. The process has been not only cathartic but also illuminating and empowering. In fact, this exercise has helped me identify what’s important, shed what isn’t, and transform in many ways. As a result, I decided to get sober, leave a job that wasn’t the right fit and pursue coaching as a profession.

Several clients and friends recently asked me to share my annual life review blueprint. What follows is an attempt to provide the framework and hopefully the nudge to complete your own annual life review.

Medium.com  click the link to read the rest of the story.

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How To Make Next Year Your Best Year

Here are a few things I learned about improving your life:

First, set ONE goal for every area of your life. I divide my goals as follows: Learning (what skills do I want to improve?), Career (what do I want to achieve in career?), Money (how much do I want to save and earn?), Relationships (what type of person do I want to become?). Set a goal that’s ambitious enough but at the same time is also reachable within a year. Aim high. But don’t make it impossible for yourself. …

dariusforoux.com click the link to read the rest of the story.

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The One Habit That Will Guarantee a Radically Better 2019

Everyone has a number of goals, but it’s the commitment to a system, a course of action, that makes the difference.

A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of success regardless of the immediate outcome.

Guardian’s Oliver Burkman, explains, “Drawing one cartoon a day is a system; so is resolving to take some kind of exercise daily — rather than setting a goal, like being able to run a marathon in four hours.”

Systems allow us to take control of our lives.

Medium.com  click the link to read the rest of the story.

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2019 Cyber Security – What to expect next

During 2019 we expect to see an increase… If a sophisticated attack involves not one but five top-notch threats synergistically working together, the defense panorama could become very blurry. Security experts have a recipe for disaster. …

The purchase of cybersecurity has led to expanding attacks that will become more sophisticated in 2019 and beyond. We will continue to influence societal expectations on security, which will trickle down to companies through hundreds of thousands of vulnerable and easy targets for attackers to profit. Driven by many falling victim to feature misconceptions, more will become key targets. Cyber products that provide consolidated feature sets have a hard time understanding each customer’s specific pain points and the bad guys know this.

In 2019, even more high-profile breaches will push the security and privacy, finally. Security is argued about until we die. That’s a particularly terrifying threat.

Medium.com  click the link to read the rest of the story.

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The Problem Is Not Your Website Or Your Product

A good business solves a problem.

Good business is solving a big problem or lots of small problems for entire strangers who you don’t know thus doing something valuable for the human race.

Solving only your problem will make you poor.

Medium.com  click the link to read the rest of the story.

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6 STEPS TO REPAIR CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS

First, it’s happened to all of us (and we’re here to help).

Second, it is impossible to understand all the contextual and environmental factors that led to the customer disengaging. It is easy for founders to believe they are the singular point of failure (which is exacerbated by processing the event of loss by themselves in an echo-chamber). The reality is that this is often not the case.  And third, some customer relationships cannot be repaired. Be OK with this.

Here are the six battle-tested steps I shared with the founder whose business had been impacted.

philhsc.com click the link to read the rest of the story.

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How to drastically simplify your workflow and get more done

“Life is simple,” wrote Confucius, “but we insist on making it complicated.”

Good advice … and timely.

In fact, Retired Navy SEAL officer and “Extreme Ownership” co-author Jocko Willink recently identified simplicity as the key to not just to effective leadership, but success itself.

The trouble is that we’re terrible at simplicity.

BusinessInsider.com  click the link to read the rest of the story.

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5 Self-evident Pieces of Advice From Top Achievers

There is so much wisdom out there and so few putting it into practice. “That’s not for me”, “It doesn’t fit my context”… are familiar alibis. Reality is, wisdom shake us. If we had to accept it, we’ll have to act on it; generating a very uncomfortable domino effect…

Medium.com  click the link to read the rest of the story.

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19 Daily Habits That Make You Less Productive (And What to Do)

What follows are 19 daily unproductive habits, and solutions to replace them with productive habits.

These are prioritized from the most distracting things that constantly put people in a reactive versus proactive state, to more granular things that can supersize and sustain productivity.

SearchEngineJournal.com  click the link to read the rest of the story.

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Amazon Web Services Reinvented the Internet into a Cash Cow

In the summer of 2003, there was an off-site meeting at Jeff Bezos’s house. We were doing this exercise, looking at what we thought our core competencies were as a company. We started off with fairly obvious things, like we were good at having a lot of selection in retail, and we were good at fulfilling that selection.

But when we looked into it more deeply, we realized that in building Amazon’s consumer business as fast as we had in the first eight years, we’d gotten really good at operating infrastructure services, things like computing and storage and database. And because our retail business was a very low-margin business…

NYmag.com  click the link to read the rest of the story.

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The Ultimate Guide to Get Started on Your Business Idea

Business ideas are great. They make us feel like we are onto something.

Something big.

Our adrenaline spikes and we want to get started right away.

But what does “getting started” even mean? Printing your business card? Making a website? Hiring a co-founder? Incorporate the business?

Not exactly.

Here are the exact steps you should take to refine and validate your idea before you do any of these things!

entrepreneurshandbook.co  click the link to read the rest of the story.

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How to Pitch a Product in Front of 7,000 People

Imagine the eyes of 7,000 people on you as four celebrity judges prepare their toughest questions to challenge your vision for the future of your company.

Medium.com  click the link to read the rest of the story.

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10 Must-Read Books That Will Make You Ridiculously Productive

While there isn’t a perfect productivity formula for everyone, the 11 reads below will inspire you to create your very own process that works for getting more stuff done—and enjoying every day more in the process.

ProductHunt.com  click the link to read the rest of the story.

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Great Companies Obsess Over Productivity, Not Efficiency

Business leaders often think of “efficiency” and “productivity” as synonyms, two sides of the same coin.

When it comes to strategy, however, efficiency and productivity are very different. At a time when so many companies are starved for growth, senior leaders must bring a productivity mindset to their business and remove organizational obstacles to workforce productivity. This view differs substantially from the relentless focus on efficiency that has characterized management thinking for most of the last three decades, but it is absolutely essential if companies are going to spur innovation and reignite profitable growth.

Harvard Business Review  click the link to read the rest of the story.

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How to stop wasting your life watching TV and do something worthwhile with your downtime

So how do you shake up this routine and begin to invest your time in activities that truly satisfy and refresh you?  As a time management coach, I’ve seen that these five strategies can help you feel like you have more free time and feel happier with how you invest it.

fastcompany.com click the link to read the rest of the story.

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Cognitive Bias: How Your Mind Plays Tricks on You and How to Overcome That at Work

Cognitive biases are common thinking errors that hinder our rational decision-making.  We don’t always see things as they are. We don’t simply glean information through the senses and act on it; instead, our minds give that info their own spin, which can sometimes be deceptive. The inner experience is not always in perfect sync with what’s going on in the outer world.

zapier.com click the link to read the rest of the story.

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Cyber security: Your boss doesn’t care and that’s not OK anymore

So why do the upper echelons of many organisations still not understand the risks they face or know what they should be doing to counter them?

One issue is that within many organisations, cyber security is still viewed as an issue for the IT department, rather than the business as a whole.

ZDnet.com click the link to read the rest of the story.

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Want to Lead? Learn to Ask the Right Questions

Have you ever walked away from a sales meeting wondering what you could have said differently to a potential client? Or do you feel as though you’re only wasting your breath trying to convince your employees to believe in a new initiative or direction? Are you tired of telling your children to clean up their rooms? Convincing others can’t come from you—it has to come from them. How does this happen? Learn to ask the right questions.

BigThink.com click the link to read the rest of the story.

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Need More Hours Every Day to Grow Your Business? Then Quit These 7 Time Wasters

Successful founders know how to manage their time well. They make room for work and play, limiting their stress levels by staying focused on the things that matter. When they run into unexpected obstacles, they don’t need to rearrange their lives to tackle the problem.

Entrepreneur.com click the link to read the rest of the story.

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The Decision Matrix: How to Prioritize What Matters

Not all decisions need the same process. Sometimes, trying to impose the same process on all decisions leads to difficulty identifying which ones are most important, bogging us down and stressing us out.

FSblog.com click the link to read the rest of the story.

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Quit these 4 bad habits to start actually achieving your goals

Billionaire Ray Dalio

When it comes to setting your goals, the sky is the limit. There are a few exceptions, like “playing center on a professional basketball team if you’re short, or running a four-minute mile at age 70,” Dalio writes, but aside from that there is no dream too big to tackle.

“What you think is attainable is just a function of what you know at the moment,” he writes. “Remember that great expectations create great capabilities. If you limit your goals to what you know you can achieve, you are setting the bar way too low.”

cnbc.com click the link to read the rest of the story.

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Life Doesn’t Reward You For What You Know, But For What You Do

The quality of input determines the quality of output.  Most people have adapted to consuming low-level information on the internet. This is the equivalent of filling your car with water or eating McDonalds every meal.

TheMedium.com click the link to read the rest of the story.

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How to Be Brave When You’re Feeling Scared: The Secret to Performing Under Pressure

Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.”  Think of courage that way and it’s obvious that bravery — sometimes an extraordinary level of bravery — is required in leadership and business. Like taking a chance when others will not. Or following your vision, no matter where it leads. Or standing up for what you believe in, even though those beliefs are extremely unpopular.  Or simply doing the right thing, even when doing the right thing is also the hardest thing.

Inc.com click the link to read the rest of the story.

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