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Power of Habit Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business By Charles Duhigg An award-winning...

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 19:29:54 +1000

Power of Habit
Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
By Charles Duhigg

An award-winning “New York Times” business reporter takes readers to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With penetrating intelligence and an ability to distill vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation.

A young woman walks into a laboratory. Over the past two years, she has transformed almost every aspect of her life. She has quit smoking, run a marathon, and been promoted at work. The patterns inside her brain, neurologists discover, have fundamentally changed.

Marketers at Procter & Gamble study videos of people making their beds. They are desperately trying to figure out how to sell a new product called Febreze, on track to be one of the biggest flops in company history. Suddenly, one of them detects a nearly imperceptible pattern—and with a slight shift in advertising, Febreze goes on to earn a billion dollars a year.

An untested CEO takes over one of the largest companies in America. His first order of business is attacking a single pattern among his employees—how they approach worker safety—and soon the firm, Alcoa, becomes the top performer in the Dow Jones.

What do all these people have in common? They achieved success by focusing on the patterns that shape every aspect of our lives. They succeeded by transforming habits.

In “The Power of Habit, “award-winning “New York Times” business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With penetrating intelligence and an ability to distill vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation.

Along the way we learn why some people and companies struggle to change, despite years of trying, while others seem to remake themselves overnight. We visit laboratories where neuroscientists explore how habits work and where, exactly, they reside in our brains. We discover how the right habits were crucial to the success of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and civil-rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr. We go inside Procter & Gamble, Target superstores, Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, NFL locker rooms, and the nation’s largest hospitals and see how implementing so-called keystone habits can earn billions and mean the difference between failure and success, life and death.

At its core, “The Power of Habit” contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding how habits work.
Habits aren’t destiny. As Charles Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives.

Kalo (Mataso Printmakers)Kavaman (from `Bebellic’ portfolio) 2007 Screenprint on Magnani paper...

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 17:49:29 +1000

Kalo (Mataso Printmakers)
Kavaman (from `Bebellic’ portfolio) 2007
Screenprint on Magnani paper ed.1/45 | 76 x 56cm | Purchased 2008. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery

This body of work was created by a group of artists from the Mataso community in Ohlen village, Port Vila, Vanuatu, through a series of workshops established in 2004 by Carl Amneus, Jack Siviu Martau and Australian artist Newell Harry. Most of these young artists are from the post-independence (July 1980) generation, and have spent more time on the larger island of Efate, where television, advertising, reggae and soul music have merged with local and traditional beliefs and lifestyle.

While there are vestiges of the indigenous graphic tradition of sand-drawing in the prints – a practice found mainly in the northern islands of the archipelago of Vanuatu, such as Pentecost, Malakula and the Banks Islands – much of the imagery produced by this younger group has been appropriated from the commercial sphere. Sand-drawing is characteristically a linear geometrical design drawn with the fingers into the sand. The sand-drawings are complex, relating to both ritual and practical knowledge, cosmologies and song cycles, and have increasingly been adopted as graphic branding for Vanuatu.

A PORTRAIT OF INCREDIBLE CHANGE AND NEW PROSPERITY—A GROUND UP VIEW OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, A STORY...

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 17:43:35 +1000

A PORTRAIT OF INCREDIBLE CHANGE AND NEW PROSPERITY—A GROUND UP VIEW OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, A STORY OF SOCIAL AND NATIONAL TRANSFORMATION TOLD THROUGH INDIVIDUAL LIVES.

“Lively, anecdotal look at the people who have been vastly changed by the entrepreneurial explosion...

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 17:40:29 +1000

“Lively, anecdotal look at the people who have been vastly changed by the entrepreneurial explosion in India…. An honest, conflicted glimpse of a country ‘still sorting through the contradictions of a rapid, and inevitably messy, transformation.’”
– Kirkus Reviews

“India today is in the midst of profound change and Akash Kapur captures the impact of that change...

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 17:38:59 +1000

“India today is in the midst of profound change and Akash Kapur captures the impact of that change on the lives of ordinary Indians with a narrative that avoids all clichés, platitudes, and simplifications.”
– Gurcharan Das, author of India Unbound

“Beautifully written…Akash Kapur celebrates the gains and mourns the losses, conveying a complex...

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 17:37:40 +1000

“Beautifully written…Akash Kapur celebrates the gains and mourns the losses, conveying a complex story through the ups and downs of the lives of some fascinating individual women and men.”
– Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of Cosmopolitanism

“Through a series of deft character sketches, Akash Kapur captures the contradictions of life in...

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 17:35:00 +1000

“Through a series of deft character sketches, Akash Kapur captures the contradictions of life in modern India—between city and country, technology and aesthetics, development and the environment, greed and selflessness, individual fulfilment and community obligation. His writing is fresh and vivid; his perspective, empathetic and appealingly non-judgemental.”
– Ramachandra Guha, author of India after Gandhi

“This is a remarkably absorbing account of an India in transition – full of challenges and...

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 17:33:00 +1000

“This is a remarkably absorbing account of an India in transition – full of challenges and contradictions, but also of expectations, hope, and ultimately optimism.”
– Amartya Sen, Nobel Laureate and author of Development as Freedom

“Akash Kapur is a wonderful writer: a courageously clear-eyed observer, an astute listener, a...

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 17:32:17 +1000

“Akash Kapur is a wonderful writer: a courageously clear-eyed observer, an astute listener, a masterful portraitist, and a gripping story teller. His voice is as sure and as intimate as his subject is chaotic and immense, and he proves himself the perfect guide to the enthralling promise and the terrifying menace of a society in the throes of colossal, epochal, all-encompassing change.”
—Philip Gourevitch, author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families

India Becoming

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 17:22:00 +1000

India Becoming

Change

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Change

HPI

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 21:21:21 +1000

HPI

GDP

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 21:21:07 +1000

GDP

India was burning—and, in a similar way, it was eroding, melting, drying, silting up,...

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 21:20:47 +1000

India was burning—and, in a similar way, it was eroding, melting, drying, silting up, suffocating. Across the country, rivers and lakes and glaciers were disappearing, underground aquifers being depleted, air quality declining, beaches being swept away.

The numbers were astounding. According to a government report I read, almost half of India’s land suffered from some kind of erosion. Seventy percent of its surface water was polluted. Earlier this year, a study conducted by Yale and Columbia universities concluded that India had the worst air quality in the world.

In the weeks and months after the garbage first started blowing into my living room, I came to see this terrible environmental toll as a form of collateral damage: it was the price the country was paying for its rapid growth, for a model of development that elevated prosperity above all else.

For years, India had been skeptical of environmentalists and their concerns. In 1972, Indira Gandhi, then the country’s prime minister, attended the first United Nations Conference on the environment, in Stockholm, and announced that poverty was the worst form of pollution.

It was a formulation that stuck. People I know who were involved in India’s latent environmental movement during the 70s and 80s remember an uphill struggle. They were accused of elitism, and of being insensitive to the plight of the poor.

Environmentalists like to say that their cause needn’t have a developmental cost, that environmentalism is a win-win proposition. That’s not always true: sometimes, tough choices are required. Tradeoffs have to be made. This is true everywhere in the world (think of the United States’ reluctance to impose a carbon tax for fear that it will stifle jobs), but perhaps especially in a poor country like India.

Increasingly, though, I’ve found myself thinking that after two decades of economic reforms, after a boom that has lifted millions from poverty, India has reached a stage in its growth where Indira Gandhi’s old formulation is breaking down.

Today, economic development and environmentalism are no longer mutually exclusive. Experts estimate that, if it were quantified, the cost of environmental damage in India would shave anywhere from 2.5 to 4 percent off GDP. The nation’s emerging environmental calamity threatens to overshadow—and undermine—its phenomenal growth.

A Portrait of Life in Modern India By Akash Kapur

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 21:11:00 +1000

A portrait of incredible change and economic development, of social and national transformation told through individual lives.

The son of an Indian father and an American mother, Akash Kapur spent his formative years in India and his early adulthood in the United States. In 2003, he returned to his birth country for good, eager to be part of its exciting growth and modernization. What he found was a nation even more transformed than he had imagined, where the changes were fundamentally altering Indian society, for better and sometimes for worse.

To further understand these changes, he sought out the Indians experiencing them firsthand. The result is a rich tapestry of lives being altered by economic development, and a fascinating insider’s look at many of the most important forces shaping our world today. Much has been written about the rise of Asia and a rebalancing of the global economy, but rarely does one encounter these big stories with the level of nuance and detail that Kapur gives us in India Becoming.

Among the characters we meet are a broker of cows who must adapt his trade to a modernizing economy; a female call center employee whose relatives worry about her values in the city; a feudal landowner who must accept that he will not pass his way of life down to his children; and a career woman who wishes she could “outsource” having a baby.

Through these stories and many others, Kapur provides a fuller understanding of the complexity and often contradictory nature of modern India. India Becoming is particularly noteworthy for its emphasis on rural India-a region often neglected in writing about the country, though 70 percent of the population still lives there. In scenes reminiscent of R. K. Narayan’s classic works on the Indian countryside, Kapur builds intimate portraits of farmers, fishermen, and entire villages whose ancient ways of life are crumbling, giving way to an uncertain future that is at once frightening and full of promise. Kapur himself grew up in rural India; his descriptions of change and modernization are infused with a profound-at times deeply poignant- firsthand understanding of the loss that must accompany all development and progress.

“India Becoming” is essential reading for anyone interested in our changing world and the newly emerging global order. It is a riveting narrative that puts the personal into a broad, relevant and revelational context.

Photo

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 21:09:16 +1000