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Workstation: For Multitaskers, 2012 May Be a Year of Revenge

December 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment

DEVICE BACKLASH As workers add more electronic devices, Web sites, software programs and apps to their arsenals, there is a point at which efficiency and satisfaction suffer. More devices can lead to more multitasking, which, though viewed by many as a virtue, has been shown to interfere with concentration.

More devices also harbor more vortexes of distraction, like Facebook, shopping sites and cute animal videos. Maintaining focus may well be one of the biggest daily challenges that workers will face this year, now that smartphones and tablets have become ubiquitous.

More workers will probably revolt against the idea that they must be “on” all the time, recognizing that both their work and personal lives will improve if they create stricter boundaries. Sometimes this expectation is self-imposed; at other times, it’s part of the corporate culture. Look for more companies to address the issue directly. Last month, for example, Volkswagen agreed with labor representatives in Germany to limit work-related e-mails on BlackBerrys during off-hours.

THE TRAINING ADVANTAGE More technology necessitates more training. During the recession, too many workers learned new technology imperfectly, on the fly, or not at all. Fortunately, corporate spending on training rose in 2011 over the previous year, according to a report in Training magazine.

The pace at which new technology emerges and becomes paramount is quickening as never before. Last year, HTML 5 for the Web was the hottest skill that a job seeker could have; now it’s a knowledge of apps, said Alison Doyle, a job search specialist for About.com, which is owned by The New York Times Company.

Both the employed and the unemployed cannot be complacent about their skills, and must be assertive about keeping up with the latest computer languages and applications, she said.

THE RISE OF THE INDEPENDENT WORKER Both by necessity and choice, more workers are deciding to go it alone as consultants, contractors, freelancers and other independent operators. Look for that trend to intensify this year.

Thanks to technology, it’s easier than ever for “people to find projects and projects to find people,” and they aren’t restricted by geography, said Gene Zaino, president and chief executive of MBO Partners, which deals with issues surrounding independent consultants.

That’s great for people who seek flexibility and autonomy. But working alone can be lonely, and a lack of structure can slow productivity. That’s why the phenomenon of co-working — where independent workers in a range of fields gather in one room to conduct business and drink lots of coffee or tea — is likely to spread.

Of course, not everyone chooses to be independent. Many people have been forced into becoming contractors as more companies with limited budgets hire on a project basis, Mr. Zaino said. Often, these workers’ pay is lower than it would be if they were full-time employees, and benefits are nonexistent.

Now enter the federal government, which doesn’t like how these fuzzy arrangements affect tax collection. Expect a big government push to classify contract workers as employees, Mr. Zaino said.

THE UNEMPLOYMENT DIVIDE The overall unemployment rate is 8.6 percent, but break down the number by educational attainment and the picture looks different. Those with college degrees are the lucky ones: the jobless rate for them is 4.4 percent. That compares with 8.8 percent for those with only a high school diploma and 13.2 percent for those with no diploma at all.

Consider, too, that less than 30 percent of the United States population age 25 or older has a bachelor’s degree or higher. Large groups of Americans will continue to be unemployed or underemployed unless more training and educational opportunities become available.

Another disadvantaged group is the long-term unemployed, who are having trouble rejoining the work force as employers show a preference for hiring people who currently hold jobs or have been laid off only recently.

More than 30 percent of jobless Americans have been unemployed for a year or more, according to federal data. Congress will continue to wrestle with their plight, and their benefits, this year. Without help, this group risks falling so far behind that it can’t catch up.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=8886bd218a5161abe70083580cd58c05

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Corner Office | John Donovan: John Donovan of AT&T, on Seeking Results Instead of Praise

December 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Q. What were some early leadership lessons for you?

A. There are certain characteristics that give people a start — and for me, I remember starting to use them when I was named captain of my hockey team. I think after that it becomes practice. I think those characteristics are the ability to set a framework that makes sense to people, and being articulate. You can look at the landscape, characterize it and set a framework for action, then be able to articulate it clearly. You have to have antennas for picking out what’s really important.

So you have to have those basic skills and be a good pattern recognizer. I was always good at those problems where you go “two, four, six, eight, what’s next?” And you start to put those skills together and then, like anything else, you get better with practice.

That said, if there’s a situation where someone else needs to lead, and it’s working, that is A-O.K. I don’t feel a burning need to be in charge, and I don’t feel that it’s a bad thing to follow when the right things are getting done. So in some respects, I don’t have the innate drive that certain people have about control and ownership and leadership. When I left Silicon Valley, a lot of people bet me that I wouldn’t last at ATT. They figured that because I’d been a C.E.O. before, I couldn’t go work at a big company where you have bosses, and you don’t control everything.

It really isn’t even a consideration for me. I just derive great satisfaction from a well-played plan. As a matter of fact, I have an aversion to situations where credit is showered upon leaders. Those don’t sit easily with me. Maybe that’s because I was one of 11 kids in our family. I love engaging, but I don’t like the compliments, with somebody saying, “Hey, great job.”

Q. Other lessons?

A. The first thing I noticed very quickly early on was that hard work is central to what you do, and that’s not any magic or science. I said, “Well, if I start today, and I outwork everybody, then the only question is the starting point.” So I figured that if I work really hard I can be in the top 5 percent in any field. It just gave me some comfort to say, O.K., I’m going to do fine financially, so I shouldn’t make decisions based on money. My objective should be to gain the broadest set of experiences I can, and just try to drill deep everywhere I can. And so I played the game for breadth. Early in my career, I bought businesses, fixed them and sold them. Some went well; some didn’t. I did some home development. I was in sales. I went back to business school.

A lot of people work hard to get ahead, and I recognized early on that it’s a differentiator. I just figured that there was a certain amount of this that’s just raw tonnage.

Q. What else?

A. I worked at Deloitte, and became a partner there. That’s probably where a lot of my development occurred as a leader. There were simple things around teams. I developed team skills because I started to engage in deliberate deflection of credit in an environment where it was all about credits. What I started realizing is that people appreciated when you played for the result, and not for your role on the team. So I learned there that giving credit away, deflecting credit, was an effective thing to do. I think I learned a lot of subtleties about teams and how you assemble teams.

Q. Can you share some more insights on that?

A. If you figure there’s a karma pool out there floating around for credits, you have to stop playing for credits. I remember the day I realized that, and that I probably never again needed to involve scorekeeping in anything that I did.

Q. What are some questions you ask when you’re interviewing job candidates?

A. I always ask questions about what words people would want on their tombstone. So I’ll ask, “If your professional colleagues were going to put three words on your tombstone — I mean literally three — what would those three words be?” And then the follow-up question is always the one that surprises people. I will then ask, “Instead of three, what’s the one word?”

I’ve tried to assemble teams with people who were grounded enough, and comfortable enough, to be able to have these kinds of conversations. When you find people who have that sort of grounding, then it can be about the problem you’re working to solve together, and not about the person.

The leadership part for me now is so much more about game planning than about the role that I play in the game plan. I love the opportunity to take a role that I had and give it away to another team member, and the team result is as good or better. I sort of see myself over time as needing to play the game less, but I’m becoming better at getting even better results by that combination of the right framework and the right people in the right positions.

Q. Back to your tombstone question. What’s the one word for you?

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=d11ed086d0bec7cb3969febe9fa2f780

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2011: The Year of the Turndown

December 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Real estate brokers, lawyers and property managers all said boards had significantly stepped up their financial scrutiny of prospective buyers in the last year. Condo boards technically cannot reject prospective buyers, but brokers say some condo and co-op boards now use delaying tactics and requests for further documentation as a strategy to drive away certain buyers.

It was a year in which many real estate rules seemed to have been turned on their heads. Condos behaved like co-ops. Buyers with mortgages were looked at more favorably than all-cash buyers. Why? The reasoning goes that since mortgages are so hard to come by, anyone who gets one has been thoroughly vetted by the bank.

It also became much more common for buildings — co-ops and condos alike — to ask buyers to put large sums of money in escrow as a way of guaranteeing that they would not default on their monthly carrying charges.

Many buildings asked buyers to put six months’ to two years’ worth of maintenance into escrow. But brokers also said that in these uncertain financial times, some buildings had asked for escrow of as much as 10 years’ worth of maintenance. “That sounds to me like a nice way of saying goodbye,” said Paul Gottsegen, the director of Halstead Management, which manages more than 200 buildings.

One such case was handled by Warburg Realty. Frederick Peters, Warburg’s president, said the amount requested for escrow, which was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, “seemed crazy to me,” but the buyers agreed and the deal went through.

Mr. Peters said he did not know why the board had been so concerned about the buyers. “We don’t get to ask those questions,” he said, adding that the buyers were a young married couple with parental guarantors who were “very financially solid.”

Mr. Peters said Warburg used to see only a few such deals in a given year, but handled more than 20 in 2011. “That’s a lot of deals,” he said. “But if escrow is a way for a board to get comfortable with a buyer, I’d much rather have that than a board turndown.”

Steven D. Sladkus, a Manhattan co-op and condo lawyer, says most buyers who have the wherewithal will agree to escrow accounts, “because it’s still their money and in most cases, they’ll get it all back if they pay faithfully for a year or two years.” In some cases, though, buildings ask to maintain the escrow indefinitely.

But Jessica Cohen, an executive vice president of Prudential Douglas Elliman, says some buyers take offense when they get an escrow request. “They see it as the board considering them unfit to buy without an insurance policy,” she said.

Ms. Cohen estimated that about a third of her deals last year involved an escrow request, so she now routinely mentions the possibility to all her buyers. “It’s better to let them know it’s a possibility rather than have it come up as a surprise at the point of a board approval and risk having the deal fall apart,” she said.

Brokers and property managers said that these days, deals that used to take a month can take two to three months, as boards request a second or third year’s worth of tax returns and other financial documents or an escrow account. Boards have also become much more selective in other ways.

“People that would have passed boards two years ago, offering to pay all cash, aren’t passing now,” said Leslie Modell Rosenthal, a managing director at Warburg. Some condos now frown on investors, she said, even though that category of buyer has helped sustain condos for years. Other buildings that routinely approved purchases involving parental guarantors are no longer doing so.

“Even if there isn’t an outright rejection,” Ms. Modell Rosenthal said, “some boards will drag their feet to the point where the buyer gives up and goes away.” Boards are not required to give their reasons for turning down an applicant, but brokers say it is often because they feel he or she has too much debt, not enough liquidity or not enough of a job history.

Although some high-priced exclusive buildings have sought buyers with liquid assets of two to three times the purchase price of an apartment, buildings have typically expected them to have about two years’ worth of mortgage and maintenance in liquid assets, or $50,000 to $100,000, depending on the size of the apartment. But today, brokers say, many more buildings want buyers to have several hundred thousand dollars in liquid assets.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=f9cae65f7559dfb716ab82e7f5a9ae59

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Letters: Letters: Business Lessons From the Shackleton Mission

December 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Re “Reinvention and Survival, Circa 1915” (Dec. 25), Nancy F. Koehn saw several business leadership lessons in the failed expedition of the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton.

In describing Shackleton and his crew, the article said that “whatever came before them on the ice, their leader would give his all to bring them home alive.” Today, however, chief executives fail to understand that this is a leader’s primary responsibility.

Corporate tyrants are laying off employees the minute the value of their own stock options threatens to decrease by a penny. Driven by greed, these executives lack what your article called a “credible commitment to a larger purpose and flexible, imaginative methods to achieve a goal,” where the larger purpose is the prosperity of the human race as a whole, not the magnitude of their personal portfolios.

Bill Appledorf

San Francisco, Dec. 25

•

To the Editor:

In the article, Professor Koehn says Shackleton’s ability to adapt to new circumstances could be applied to various recent events: the financial crisis of 2008, the gulf oil spill and the Japanese nuclear disaster.

That’s not the right message. The right message is a little thinking ahead can prevent crises.

Shackleton led a disastrous misadventure to traverse the South Pole, and didn’t listen to warnings. While reacting correctly to a crisis is admirable, thinking ahead to prevent the crisis is a lot better.

Looking at the 2008 financial crisis, why did we previously relax regulations on financial institutions? As for the oil spill, why did we not have strong controls on offshore drilling? And in the case of the nuclear disaster, why build a nuclear plant on the coast in an earthquake zone?

Roger Craine

Berkeley, Calif., Dec. 25

The writer is an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

•

To the Editor:

As a retired Latin teacher, I suspect that Shackleton kept in mind a particular scene early in “The Aeneid” by Virgil, where a small band fleeing the Greeks’ destruction of Troy and newly shipwrecked on unknown land — wet, hungry and despairing — is nonetheless rallied to survival by its leader, Aeneas. He assures the group that someday it will recall this moment with something like pleasure.

But Virgil tells us that, even as Aeneas utters these hopeful words, he presses grief deep into his heart, lest his true feelings unnerve his followers.

Hannah Metzger

Chicago, Dec. 27

•

To the Editor:

When discussing leadership, many people miss one key ingredient: A great leader never accomplishes his goals alone. One of the first principles of leadership is to surround yourself with highly competent people and let them do whatever it is they do best.

In the case of Shackleton’s crew, Frank Worsley stands out as such a person. He was instrumental in guiding the small lifeboat from Elephant Island to South Georgia Island to seek help in rescuing the stranded crew. He had to navigate through some of the worst seas in the world, in conditions of unbelievably bad weather.

Ernest Fitzgerald

New Orleans, Dec. 26

 

The writer is a retired Marine lieutenant colonel.

Letters for Sunday Business may be sent to sunbiz@nytimes.com.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=79a3f31340a7b4f1b150221f573db408

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The Boss: Zoo New England’s Chief, Ever the Animals’ Advocate

December 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment

My parents were very tolerant of my love of animals, even if they didn’t always appreciate what I brought home. Once I tried to pool money from family and friends to buy a baby alligator. That didn’t work out, but my parents did let me keep snapping turtles in my bedroom in the winter.

My father was an engineer who owned a heating, ventilation and air-conditioning design company. One of my brothers later took over the business. I decided to attend the University of Maine, and earned a degree in wildlife management.

When I graduated in 1980, I was applying for jobs in Africa and other places known for their wildlife. I had no interest in zoos, but I needed some experience and some income. A family friend said I should talk to the director of the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston. I wore my only suit for my appointment with Richard Naegeli, who headed the zoo, which was then part of a state agency. He offered me a job as a temporary laborer in the bird department. The zoo was much smaller then, with about 30 people, and I was also able to work with the zebras and the antelopes.

After six months, I was transferred to the Stone Zoo, also run by the same state agency, about 15 miles away, in Stoneham, Mass., where I was able to work with their tigers, great apes and bears. After working as a zoo attendant for three and a half years, I became head zookeeper in 1985. I’ve had almost every job at each zoo since then, including curator for mammals, where I oversaw the donation or loan of animals.

There were a lot of difficulties in running a state-funded zoo, so in 1992 the Franklin Park Zoo and the Stone Zoo were reorganized as a private nonprofit. We were always short-handed. One time, two of us had to transfer two gorillas between our zoos. We loaded them on what we called the “Gorilla Express”: two crates in an old box truck. One of the gorillas started cracking the boards of his crate, so we were very relieved to arrive at our destination.

In 2002, I was appointed president and chief executive of the zoos, officially called Zoo New England. Over the years, we have gained official accreditation for both zoos and expanded Franklin Park and overhauled Stone Zoo so visitors can get up close to cold-hardy animals like porcupines and black bears.

We participate in collaborative breeding and conservation with other zoos. We now have more than 1,000 animals, and 150 employees tending to them. And we have well over 500,000 visitors a year.

Although my career stayed close to home geographically, I have been able to be active in wildlife conservation internationally. As part of an effort to add more jaguars to the zoo, and to keep their bloodlines fresh, we worked to preserve their habitat in Guatemala. The zoo, together with several other zoos and conservation organizations, has also been helping to secure the various species of frogs that live in Panama, to create a Noah’s Ark of amphibians.

Closer to home, we are helping to expand the numbers, and habitat, for the beautiful and endangered Karner blue butterfly in New Hampshire. We also focus on educating children about animals. I rely on advice from my wife, a middle-school teacher, on how to interest students in wildlife.

Every minute of my time here at the zoo has been challenging, but one of the advantages of being the boss is that I can just do what I think is the right thing.

As told to Elizabeth Olson.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=18e3f78437ddc140d48693fab431a2e9

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Off the Shelf: In ‘Mondo Agnelli,’ a Ride on Fiat’s Roller-Coaster — Review

December 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Without access, without hours of interviews with the people who populate the story, a narrative book is all but doomed. You think everyone would be buying Walter Isaacson’s book if Steve Jobs hadn’t decided to cooperate? Doubt it. What you get without access is an “outside” book, often cold and impersonal, typically cobbled together from magazine and newspaper clippings and interviews with analysts and others who never quite know what’s really going on.

Jennifer Clark, a onetime Rome bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, has a rousing tale to tell in “Mondo Agnelli: Fiat, Chrysler and the Power of a Dynasty (Wiley Sons, $29.95). It’s the story of the great Italian industrialist, Gianni Agnelli; the turnaround at his family’s crown jewel, Fiat, after his death; and Fiat’s subsequent takeover and government-financed rescue of Chrysler.

Ms. Clark has a good grasp of her narrative, especially when it remains in Italy. From the detail in her text and footnotes, it would appear that she enjoyed decent if unspectacular access to current and former Fiat and Agnelli executives. And, unfortunately, in the end, that’s what “Mondo Agnelli” ends up being: decent if unspectacular.

The book’s most serious failing is an inability to shed much new light on the Chrysler side of the story. “Most of those” at Chrysler, Ms. Clark notes, declined to be interviewed, which is a shame, given that it’s the Chrysler angle that will appeal most to American readers.

The Italian sections of the book are stronger than those set in the United States, so much so that I wonder how good the book might have been had Ms. Clark corralled a co-author based in Detroit. After Fiat’s 2008-9 takeover of Chrysler, the surprising turnaround that Fiat’s C.E.O., Sergio Marchionne then engineers consumes all of 31 pages, the last 10 percent of the book. I’ve read Fortune articles almost as long, and with far more insider sources.

The book begins — well, check that a moment. The story begins toward the end of the 19th century, when a well-to-do Italian cavalryman, Giovanni Agnelli, gets together with several of his chums in the northern city of Turin and decides to start an automobile company. The book doesn’t begin in the same place, though; Ms. Clark is one of those authors who love setting a scene in the present, then looping back again and again, Tarantino-style, to fill in the background. This can work in some books, but here I just kept getting confused.

The company that Agnelli founded became Fiat, and Ms. Clark effectively traces its history and development through world wars and Communist-led strikes. Giovanni was a devotee and friend of Henry Ford’s, and copied Ford’s methods wherever possible. When Giovanni died in 1945, control passed to his grandson, Gianni, who promptly spent the next decade or so romping across the French Riviera with the likes of Pamela Harriman while professional managers ran things back in Turin. For the next 40 years, Gianni kept Fiat afloat, no small accomplishment.

One of the stronger themes that Ms. Clark develops is the importance of the city’s history in Fiat’s growth. Once the capital of the House of Savoy, Italy’s royal family until 1946, Turin retained Savoy’s “Prussian” values well into the 20th century. Loyalty, discipline and hard work were its hallmarks, as they became Fiat’s.

But while loyalty and discipline kept Fiat alive during Gianni Agnelli’s reign at the company — and his family in control — they did not foster much in the way of long-term creativity or ingenuity. By the last years before Gianni’s death, in 2003, Fiat’s culture had calcified. Modern methods, like the manufacture of single parts that could be used in different makes of cars, passed it by. Engineers ran the show; they made the cars, then told the marketing people how many they needed to sell. Nobody thought of asking the marketing folks what kind of car people might actually want.

As a result, Fiat churned out lots of fine little cars that not enough people wanted to buy.

Relief came, unexpectedly, in the person of Gianni’s grandson, John Elkann, who joined the board in 1997 at the age of 21. Though a neophyte, he nevertheless had the good sense to hire Mr. Marchionne, then working in Switzerland. Mr. Marchionne blasted through Fiat’s aging culture, drawing around him scores of young hotshots who dragged Fiat into the 21st century, and then rescued Chrysler.

Ms. Clark does an excellent job of showing how all this played out internally, in large part, one senses, because Mr. Marchionne himself helped guide her through it. Access, access, access.

In the prose, Ms. Clark embraces too many clichés; the phrase “last but not least” is a special favorite. But her sentences are crisp and clear, and she keeps the story moving along nicely, from Giovanni to Gianni to Marchionne. She is especially good at conjuring a sense of place, whether in the Fiat factories or the many Agnelli villas and funerals that dot the text.

All in all, “Mondo Agnelli” is worth a read, even if one remains aware there is probably room for a more ambitious, Ron Chernow-style book on the Agnellis and their empire to be published someday.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=6c72908db33d533b91b61c146ec6c3b5

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Novelties: Wordnik’s Online Dictionary: No Arbiters, Please

December 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Not Wordnik, the vast online dictionary.

No modern-day Samuel Johnson or Noah Webster ponders each prospective entry there. Instead, automatic programs search the Internet, combing the texts of news feeds, archived broadcasts, the blogosphere, Twitter posts and dozens of other sources for the raw material of Wordnik citations, says Erin McKean, a founder of the company.

Then, when you search for a word, Wordnik shows the information it has found, with no editorial tinkering. Instead, readers get the full linguistic Monty.

“We don’t pre-select and pre-prune,” she said. “We show you what’s out there now. Then we let people decide whether to use a word or not.”

At one time, she was the head of the pruners, as principal editor of the New Oxford American Dictionary. She is also an author and columnist. (She wrote “On Language” columns for The New York Times as a substitute for William Safire.)

But Ms. McKean has chosen a different path at Wordnik. “Language changes every day, and the lexicographer should get out of the way,” she said. “You can type in anything, and we’ll show you what data we have.”

When readers ask about a word, Wordnik provides definitions on the left-hand side of the screen. But it is the example sentences, featured on the right-hand side, that are crucial to a reader’s understanding of a new term, she said.

“Dictionary definitions tend to be out of date or incomplete,” she said. “Our goal is to find examples on the Web that use the word so clearly that you can understand its meaning from reading the sentence.”

To do this, the site processes a vast reservoir of language, keeping tabs on more than six million words automatically, said Tony Tam, Wordnik’s vice president for engineering. “But the numbers change every second,” he said. “It’s not a static list.”

Where does all this text come from? “You’d be amazed how fast people write articles on the Web,” he said.

Wordnik does indeed fill a gap in the world of dictionaries, said William Kretzschmar, a professor at the University of Georgia and the former president of the American Dialect Society. He provides American pronunciations for the new online Oxford English Dictionary.

“It takes time for words to get into the more formal, published dictionaries,” he said. “Wordnik is sensitive to what people are interested in now.”

Wordnik, which has raised $12.8 million in venture financing, plans to use its vast database of words and word associations at the site and in many business partnerships to be announced this year, said Joel Hyrkin, the president and C.E.O.

The products will be similar to recommendation engines, but more powerful, he said. If you like a particular book, for example, Wordnik can recommend a similar one based on its understanding of words used to describe the book, he said.

“We’re not just using tags and descriptors,” he said. “Our system understands and identifies matches at a concept level.”

The company is already providing many other word-based services, including one used on the Web site of The Times to define words in articles. Wordnik is also providing a financial glossary for SmartMoney.com.

Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, who talks about language on “Fresh Air,” the NPR program, appreciates Wordnik’s breadth. “There’s a lot of useful information here,” he said. (He has also written commentaries on language for The Times.)

But he thinks that hands-on lexicographers could fine-tune the entries.

“The idea that you can pull lexicographers out of the loop and have an algorithm to mediate between me and the English language is goofy,” he said. “Without hand citations done by trained people, you get a mess.”

To illustrate his point, he noted flaws in a number of Wordnik’s definitions. The first definition of “davenport,” for instance, in three of the fives sources used by Wordnik is a kind of small writing desk. “It hasn’t meant that since Grandma was a girl,” he said.

People use a dictionary to find out what is correct, and what is incorrect, he said. “If I were a journalist looking to see if a word was being used correctly,” he said, “I wouldn’t put my eggs in the Wordnik basket.”

Mr. Tam of Wordnik said the site was constantly improving.

“We discover these words with algorithms, but they are never perfect,” he said. “We constantly have to make them better.”

WORDNIK and other new linguistic databases have come about largely because of the vast body of text on the Internet and improved algorithms for searching it, said Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.

“We now have an archived shadow universe that contains almost everything we’ve written — trillions of pages of text of published books, and now, broadcast archives as well,” he said.

Readers could always tap this reservoir by looking up examples of new words in Google Books or Google News. “But what Wordnik is giving you is not as raw as a Google search of examples,” he said, “because Wordnik sorts and clusters the examples into different senses of the word.”

Another innovative database is at Brigham Young University, where Mark Davies, a professor of linguistics, has amassed a collection, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, 1990-2011, containing millions of words of running text from articles, transcripts of conversations, and other sources. The collection, which indexes 425 million words of text — 1,000 may be from a newspaper article, for example — has been built over the last three years. It shows how often a word is used, and the types of discourse in which it is found, be it conversational speech or academic prose.

The collection also lets users see words found near a new word. “If you want to see how a word is used and what it means, the best way is to look at words nearby,” Dr. Davies said. The words are called collocates. To look up collocates of “fantasy,” for example, see http://bit.ly/rImCuH.

Dictionary builders have come a long way since the days of Johnson and Webster, said Dr. Kretzschmar at the University of Georgia. “But we have computers,” he said. “We can manage this vast network of words online and appreciate it in ways that Johnson and Webster never could.”

E-mail: novelties@nytimes.com.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/business/wordniks-online-dictionary-no-arbiters-please.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Unboxed: How Samuel Palmisano of I.B.M. Stayed a Step Ahead

December 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Yet behind I.B.M.’s relentless progress over the last decade is a game plan that has been anything but conservative. The company shed multibillion-dollar businesses. It chose higher profit margins over corporate size, and expanded aggressively overseas, seeking sales, low-cost engineering talent and quicker organizational reflexes.

Investors, however, haven’t been bored. The company’s stock price has surged. In November, Warren E. Buffett, who typically shuns technology stocks, announced he had accumulated $10 billion of I.B.M. shares, a stake of more than 5 percent.

All of that didn’t just happen. A large portion of the credit goes to Samuel J. Palmisano, who steps down on Sunday after nearly a decade as chief executive. During his tenure, I.B.M. has been a textbook case of how to drive change in a big company — when so much of the study of business innovation focuses on start-ups and entrepreneurs.

This column is a glimpse of the thinking behind some of the major steps I.B.M. has taken under Mr. Palmisano’s leadership, based on two recent interviews with him.

He says his guiding framework boils down to four questions:

• “Why would someone spend their money with you — so what is unique about you?”

• “Why would somebody work for you?”

• “Why would society allow you to operate in their defined geography — their country?”

• “And why would somebody invest their money with you?”

Mr. Palmisano formulated those questions in the months after he became C.E.O. in March 2002 His predecessor, Louis V. Gerstner Jr., recruited to I.B.M. in 1993, had already pulled the company out of a financial tailspin, first reducing the size of the work force and cutting costs, and then leading a remarkable recovery.

In meetings after he took over, Mr. Palmisano told colleagues that I.B.M. was still good, but that it wasn’t the standard-setting corporation that it had been when he joined in 1973. (A history major at Johns Hopkins and a star offensive lineman on the football team, he turned down a tryout with the Oakland Raiders of the N.F.L. for a sales job at the company.)

The four questions, he explains, were a way to focus thinking and prod the company beyond its comfort zone and to make I.B.M. pre-eminent again. He presented the four-question framework to the company’s top 300 managers at a meeting in early 2003 in Boca Raton, Fla.

“This needs to be our mission and goal, to make I.B.M. a great company,” he said, according to executives who attended the gathering.

THE pursuit of excellence in those four dimensions shaped the strategy. To focus on doing unique work, with its higher profits, meant getting out of low-margin businesses that were fading. I.B.M.’s long-range technology assessment in 2002 concluded that the personal computer business would no longer present much opportunity for innovation, at least not in the corporate market.

The hub of innovation would shift to services and software, often delivered over the Internet from data centers, connecting to all kinds of devices, including PCs. Today, that is called cloud computing; when I.B.M. started promoting the concept several years ago the company called it on-demand computing.

So Mr. Palmisano led a lengthy strategic review of the PC business, deciding to sell while it was still profitable. Internal arguments against a sell-off were intense: PCs pulled in sales of other I.B.M. products in corporate accounts, the cost of electronic parts for its larger computers would jump without the purchasing power of its big PC division, and the corporate brand and its reputation would suffer without PCs, the one I.B.M. product touched by millions of people.

Lately, Hewlett-Packard has engaged in a similar debate, first declaring that it was looking to sell its PC business, then backing off. “I’ve heard every one of the arguments, every one of them,” Mr. Palmisano says. “But if you decide you’re going to move to a different space, where there’s innovation and therefore you can do unique things and get some premium for that, the PC business wasn’t going to be it.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/business/how-samuel-palmisano-of-ibm-stayed-a-step-ahead-unboxed.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Euro Is 10 Years Old, but Few Are Celebrating

December 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Ten years later, the word “euro” in a headline is usually paired with the word “crisis.” Instead of hosting celebrations for the 10-year anniversary, policy makers appear to be staying as quiet as possible, as if hoping not to upset the brief calm that has come with the holiday season after European central bankers injected nearly $640 billion into the European banking system in December.

In Brussels, there will be neither a ceremony nor even a news conference to mark the occasion. That set the tone for other countries, many of which were doing the minimum: preparing to circulate a 2-euro commemorative coin for the anniversary.

The coin features the kind of generic symbols — a family, a ship, a factory and wind turbines — that have earned the euro a reputation as a currency designed by committee not to offend anyone, but unlikely to inspire, either.

Even without the crisis, the day 10 years ago may be one better quickly forgotten. Far more than the celebrations, what stuck in the minds of consumers after changing to the euro was the rounding up of prices at supermarkets, restaurants and bars.

Economists say that the increases were exaggerated and offset by declining prices for bigger-ticket items. But the narrative of opportunistic price-gouging on daily staples has grown rather than shrunk in the collective memory. And the perception is widespread in the euro zone that the cost of living has increased significantly as a result of its adoption.

“The problem is that for Germans, the last prices in Deutsche marks are frozen in the heads of people, and they compare the euro prices now with those,” said Ansgar Belke, research director at the German Institute for Economic Research and a member of the monetary expert panel of the European Parliament.

He said that when he went on radio shows recently to talk about the complexities of the currency union, all the callers wanted to talk about were the price increases. “The people are all thinking that the euro is a huge betrayal,” Mr. Belke said.

By many measures, the euro has been a success, replacing the German mark as the world’s second-largest reserve currency. Inflation has been kept in check, the European Central Bank’s primary objective.

The euro is still worth more compared with the dollar than when it was introduced as a trading currency in 1999 at $1.18, three years before the metal and paper euros landed in consumers’ hands. But it hit a 15-month low against the dollar last week at around $1.29, while against the yen the euro scraped 10-year lows, briefly dipping under 100 yen.

But the euro has conjured little of the affection or patriotism that the dollar evokes in America, no nickname comparable to the greenback. The fondest memories are reserved for the old national currencies.

For Ivan Grossi, a sales representative who works in Rome, the advent of the new currency was never much to celebrate. “I grew up with the lira, it was like one of the family, and I felt an enormous sadness when the euro was introduced,” he said.

Jason Charbit, a Frenchman studying business across the channel in London, called the euro bills “Monopoly money.” “Franc bills were more solid,” he said. “You had the impression you had real money.”

Michel Prieur, a numismatist in Paris and a member of the collectors group The Friends of the Euro, said that if policy makers were trying to create warm feelings toward their currency, they had gone about it all wrong, with sterile architectural designs on the bills. Coins usually have national designs on the back, but the bills have “bridges that come from nowhere and that lead nowhere” and “windows that open onto nothing,” he said.

Reinhold Gerstetter, a graphic designer who worked for Germany’s Federal Printing Office at the time, sat in on the preliminary discussions at the European Central Bank. In order not to snub any individual country, “none of the countries should be recognizable” in the designs, he told the German news site Spiegel Online last week. “Everything completely neutral,” he said.

Scott Sayare and Doreen Carvajal contributed reporting from Paris, and Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/world/europe/euro-is-10-years-old-but-few-are-celebrating.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Fair Game: 2011, a Year of Me-Firsts in Business — Fair Game

December 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Some of this stuff we already knew. Like the fact that banks love the perks that come with being too big to fail. They will lobby shamelessly to hang on to their riskiest businesses and stay perilously large. No surprise, really. A heads-we-win, tails-the-taxpayers-lose model has a lot going for it, at least for executives atop these institutions.

Here’s another lesson we didn’t need to relearn: Penalties levied on corporate miscreants, and the legal bills they rack up defending themselves, never come out of their own pockets. Insurance policies and shareholders wind up paying. Another win for the me-firsters.

And what if you run a company so far into the ground that the federal government has to take it over? Not to worry: the taxpayers may even pay your legal bills. Consider Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Since the two companies collapsed into conservatorship in 2008, taxpayers have advanced about $73 million to pay the legal bills of former executives who are fighting fraud suits and investigations dating back to 2005.

Isn’t America great?

Another unfortunate lesson we keep learning over and over is that policy makers always put off tough decisions for another day. Kicking the can down the road is so much more fun and profitable, especially for politicians worried about re-election.

But last year also provided some truly illuminating moments. A favorite was the pronouncement that if Greece were to default on its debts, it wouldn’t really count as a default at all. That determination meant that investors who had bought insurance against a possible default would be out of luck. Their policies wouldn’t pay off as expected.

Who ginned up this nondefault default? A secret committee of bankers who call the shots in the world of credit default swaps. These people happen to work for big banks that probably sold the insurance and, as a result, would be on the losing end if a Greek default were actually called a default.

It sure is good to run the Wall Street branch of the Ministry of Truth.

Another eye-opener came courtesy of the folks at MF Global, the trading house and derivatives dealer overseen by Jon S. Corzine, the former New Jersey senator and governor and former chief executive of Goldman Sachs. Investors were shocked to learn that MF Global, a supposedly legitimate brokerage firm, was so lax about its affairs that hundreds of millions of customer dollars simply vanished. Months after MF Global failed, an army of investigators is still searching for the missing money.

Washington politicians can usually be relied upon to educate the citizenry — again and again. Last year was no exception. One telling moment came late in the year, when Democrats and Republicans agreed to extend an existing payroll tax cut for two months. Helping to defray the cost was $36 billion generated through an increase in mortgage guarantee fees charged by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

That $36 billion will come out of borrowers’ hides, of course. But using Fannie and Freddie as a money spigot sent a powerful message: Never mind that losses at these mortgage giants have cost taxpayers $150 billion so far. Or that many Americans would prefer these toxic twins to go out of business sooner rather than later. As long as Fannie and Freddie are viewed as piggy banks, there is little chance that Congress will dissolve them. It looks as if these taxpayer-owned zombies, which did so much damage to our economy, are poised to live on and on.

Finally, it was in 2011 that the ugliest paradox of the financial crisis became clearer. That is, some of the very people our government had pushed to embrace the American dream of homeownership — minority groups, lower-income borrowers, immigrants and others previously shut out of the market — were the very people hurt the most by the foreclosure mess. Washington’s push to increase homeownership opened the door for companies to sell poisonous and tricky loans that have now imperiled many of the most vulnerable.

This became painfully evident in a discrimination suit filed by the Justice Department against Countrywide, once the country’s largest mortgage lender. The suit, filed in December, was based on investigators’ findings that more than 200,000 minority borrowers had been charged higher fees and rates by Countrywide than white borrowers of similar financial standing.

The Justice Department also said that Countrywide steered more than 10,000 minority borrowers into high-cost subprime mortgages even as white borrowers received standard, lower-cost loans. The company’s systems, investigators said, allowed loan officers and mortgage brokers to change the terms of mortgages without complying with fair-lending rules.

Bank of America, which bought Countrywide in 2008, agreed to pay $335 million to settle the suit. The events cited in the lawsuit occurred before its purchase of Countrywide.

But the facts assembled by the Justice Department certainly shed new light on Countrywide’s boasts of eliminating barriers to minority homeownership. Its House America program, which committed $600 billion in loans for low-income borrowers in 2003, won plaudits for Angelo R. Mozilo, Countrywide’s co-founder.

The next year, Mr. Mozilo was named Housing Person of the Year by the National Housing Council Conference. “We commend his leadership,” said G. Allan Kingston, the group’s chairman at the time, adding that it “led to the company becoming one of the top lenders to African-Americans and Hispanics, a direct result of his clear understanding that we must do more to ensure affordable homeownership opportunities throughout the nation.”

As I said: live and learn.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=9b0a501680e5cb6376ffad2ffd75c1ed

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