Three simple steps to calm your brain during any conflict this Christmas

December 23, 2015

Up in the Air

Mindfulness is the perfect awareness technique to employ when a conflict arises — whether it’s at work or home.

Instead of attacking or recoiling, and later justifying our reactions, we can learn to stay present, participate in regulating our own nervous system, and eventually, develop new, more free and helpful ways of interacting.

Practicing mindfulness in the middle of a conflict demands a willingness to stay present, to feel intensely, to override our negative thoughts, and to engage our breath to maintain presence with the body. Like any skill, it takes practice.

Here are three simple steps you can use when you find yourself with an overloaded nervous system and a body racing with a fight or flight impulse over the Xmas period.

Step 1: Stay present

Stay put and be present, be curious and explore our experience.

Step 2: Let go of the story

Completely let go of the thinking and judging mind. When we feel threatened, the mind immediately fills with all kinds of difficult thoughts and stories about what’s happening.  It isn’t that we’re wrong, but we will be more far more clear in our perceptions when the nervous system has relaxed.

Step 3: Breathe

If we inhale, counting 1, 2, 3, and 4, and then exhale, counting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, then inhale again, counting 1, 2, 3, and 4, and then exhale again, counting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6; this establishes rhythm. The volume of the breath stays consistent as it moves in and out, like sipping liquid through a narrow straw. If we manage those two qualities for just a few minutes, the breath assists us in remaining present, making it possible to stay with intense sensation in the body.

Paying attention to our body re-establishes equilibrium faster, restoring our ability to think, to listen, and relate.

Anger becomes clarity and resolve, sadness leads to compassion, jealousy becomes fuel for change.

Each time we succeed in being mindful of our body in moments of distress, we develop our capacity.

 

For mindfulness training for your company email andy@furthr.co.uk

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On January 1st the copyright expires on Hitler’s Mein Kampf

December 23, 2015

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IN GERMANY, as in the rest of Europe, copyright expires seven decades after the author’s year of death.

That applies even when the author is Adolf Hitler and the work is “Mein Kampf”.

Since 1945, the state of Bavaria has owned the book’s German-language rights and has refused to allow its republication.

German libraries stock old copies, and they can be bought and sold.

But from January 1st no permission will be needed to reprint it.

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In a poll by YouGov this year, Germans were asked what person or thing they associate with Germany.

They named Volkswagen first (awkwardly, given subsequent revelations of its cheating).

Then came Goethe and Angela Merkel, the chancellor, next the anthem, the national football team and Willy Brandt, a former chancellor.

Hitler ranked a distant seventh at 25%

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Five ways to close the strategy-execution gap

December 23, 2015

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1. Commit to an identity. Avoid getting trapped on a growth treadmill, chasing multiple market opportunities where you have no right to win. Instead, be clear-minded about what you do best, and develop a solid value proposition and build distinctive capabilities that will last for the long term. IKEA, for example, exemplify this idea by sticking religiously to their identity: “Creating a better everyday life for the many people.”

2. Translate the strategic into the everyday. Design and build your own bespoke capabilities that set you apart from other companies. Then bring those capabilities to scale in your own distinctive ways. Zara has turned the fashion industry on its head by perfecting its capabilities in fast, fashion-forward design and rapid-response manufacturing. This allows Zara to deliver an astonishing 36,000 new designs a year to more than 1,900 stores around the globe.

3. Use culture, not structure, to drive change. Tap the power of the ingrained thinking and behavior that already exists below the surface in your company instead of another structural reorganisation. The Brazilian company Natura does this beautifully. Its corporate culture celebrates relationships and nature above all else, which has helped it attract 1.5 million sales consultants. These brand zealots build relationships with seemingly every woman in South America, making Natura the region’s largest beauty and personal-care-product enterprise.

4. Cut costs to grow stronger. Marshal your resources strategically, doubling down on the few capabilities that matter most and pruning back everything else. That’s how Lego went from losing a million dollars a day in 2004 to being the world’s largest toy company in 2015. The company had major expenses in areas like like clothing and theme parks, where it didn’t have the capabilities to win. Lego cut these businesses.

5. Create the change you want to see. Starbucks is a classic example. Its customers thought they just wanted coffee, but CEO Howard Schultz knew they wanted “a third place,” beyond home and work, to gather. With 22,000 stores and counting, the company continues to develop its concept and to dominate the “coffee and community” space it created.

Does your company need an audit of its digital skills? Furthr can help. Contact  Andy@furthr.co.uk

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Prosecco is gaining ground against champagne in the sparkling wine wars

December 23, 2015

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In the US prosecco has gained tremendous ground, as sales grew 36% over the year, while Champagne sales grew just 8%. Despite the prosecco sales gains, however, Champagne still accounts for 20% of sparkling wine sales . In the UK—champagne’s largest export market by far—in the year to July, prosecco sales jumped by 72%, reaching £339 million ($503 million). Champagne sales in the same period rose only by around 1%, for a total of £250 million. This marked the first time prosecco had outsold champagne by value in the country.

For more infographics and reports contact andy@furthr.co.uk

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This London Underground Map describes the look of each station

December 22, 2015

e114c3a7fIn the recently published, 225-page London Underground Station Design Idiom is a new twist on the famous Underground map:  every line is gray while each station has a color dot that identifies which of the system’s 20 design periods it belongs to. (See above).

There follows Flashcards which describe each idiom:

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The Idiom is on exhibit at Platform, an art space behind Southwark Underground station. It’s just one element of TfL’s “Transported by Design” programming that runs until 2017.

 

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This map shows where in Europe couples are most likely to be single vs married

December 22, 2015

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Almost all regions of Germany have married couples forming at least 70 percent of family nuclei, with many regions pushing over 80 percent, while neighboring France and French-speaking Belgium show far lower levels.

Why?

Since the revolution the concubinage system has accorded some rights to unmarried French couples, a history built on by the adoption of civil partnerships for both opposite and same-sex partners in 1999. This history has lessened the stigma of unmarried cohabitation and put other legally recognized options on the table.

 

 

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Google’s Accelerated Mobile Page project is a game changer in the war with Facebook

December 22, 2015

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On a smartphone, a single page can take many seconds to load.  Multiple case studies show that people just walk away from a service that is too slow.

By contrast, AMP mobile pages load in a blink.

Compare these two pages from The Guardian (one of the most advanced media within the AMP Project.)

In the graphic below, the URL on the left is the standard mobile page, the right is the AMP version (simply add “/amp” at the end of any Guardian URL to get the accelerated version):

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The loading time is reduced by up to 80%-90%.

“Amp-html” strips off most of the conventional web page payload and only keeps the HTML code directly involved in content rendering: text, images, videos gifs, basic ad formats and a few strictly mandatory trackers.

Everything else —javascripts, iframes, embeds, large chunks of the CSS etc.— known to slow down page downloads is shuttled to a separate “container”. As for ads, they load separately, usually one second after the editorial content. No more waiting for a promotional video to start playing.

To speed up access, the other trick is a massive caching process that looks like this:

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Important: editorial content viewed from a social network or via a third party referrer will keep its economic attributes: Google does not take a cut on the ads sold by the publisher.

In practice, this entails the daunting task of connecting to the AMP ecosystem all the apparatus that comes with content publishing: ad servers, analytics such as Chartbeat (who is AMP’s founding  analytic partner), ad networks, and also audience-profiling.

So while Instant Articles is part of Facebook’s walled garden, Google’s AMP is an open project: its specifications and code are publicly available on Github, the de rigueur open-code repository.

These publishers are already on board.

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Automattic Inc. the privately-held company behind the WordPress blogging platform, is working on a dedicated AMP plug-in. This is an impactful move: WordPress powers 24% —or 60 million— of the world’s websites.

AMP is an important development in the battle between Facebook and Google.

Last Spring, Google was taken aback by Facebook’s Instant Articles announcement. (Instant Articles allows Smartphone users can read publishers posts on Facebook without leaving the app).

The staff in charge of media partnerships at Google was especially concerned about big names jumping on the Facebook bandwagon. Something needed to be done quickly to avoid letting the highly focused rival from Menlo Park take the media industry over, especially the often desperate legacy companies.
Want to try it?

Click on this link on your mobile  and search for Obama. The New York Times and the Guardian links in the box show you how fast it is.

This is the link in full:

 

https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?esrch=AcceleratedMobilePages::Preview,AcceleratedMobilePagesDesktop::Promo&gws_rd=cr&ei=dk15Vr3vM8qBU-XxgvAF

 

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