Key Learnings & Advice

 From the leading educational series the Ivy's newsletter here are some of the top take aways from March 2022 - April 2022 video education series:

1. A Radical New Way to Negotiate with Barry Nalebuff
   I think a lot of people think of negotiation like Listerine. I hate it, but I use it. And it doesn't have to be that way. There's two activities in negotiation. You want to create value and you want to capture value, war and peace. In Tolstoy it's seven years of war, seven years of peace. Here, it's simultaneous war and peace. How do you figure out how to cooperate with somebody while at the same time being careful that you don't get taken advantage of? So that's the trick and ultimately that's the new way of negotiating, which is to agree up front to split the pie fairly by splitting the surplus value generated by the deal equally. Now we can focus our attention on how to make the pie bigger.
    
2. Converted: The Data-Driven Way to Win Customers' Hearts with Neil Hoyne
   The biggest limitation companies set on themselves is that they don’t allow their employees to learn more about their customers. What you really want to focus on is not only what questions you want answered, but how you empower people in your organization to ask more of those questions. If you have a hypothesis, how many steps do you have to go through to ask questions about it to your customers? How can you reduce the number of steps required to ask such questions, so that your colleagues can ask your customers more questions, and get more insights to elevate your business?
    
3. How to Master Conflict Resolution in High-Stakes Relationships with Jayson Gaddis
   Becoming a better listener is one of the biggest factors in cultivating successful relationships, both business and personal. My acronym for that is LUFU: listen until they feel understood. With LUFU, people feel seen, heard, understood, supported and they feel like you know them. In the most stressful moments, all of our tools and resources go out the window. If you can triple down on listening until people feel understood, it’s going to go a long way to not only avoid conflict but to prepare you better for the future when it does happen.
    
4. How to Create a Transformative Culture of Belonging at work with Ruchika Tulshyan
   Research shows purpose, belonging, values, and aligning with an organization's mission could even be enough to have millennials take a pay cut, just to find an organization where they belong, feel like they're valued, and their values align with the organization's mission. What's at stake is that when we do not have that, we see a great resignation taking place, the great realignment. We're seeing people leave the workforce in droves and create a different future for themselves.
    
5. How to Break Through Inertia to Find Your Path Forward with Britt Frank
   Your sense of smell goes offline when your brain perceives danger. For a simple cue to let your brain know you’re okay, smell something. I carry with me these little essential oil bottles everywhere I go. Logically I know that I'm safe, but we often discount that even when we know we are safe, parts of our brains are going, ah, danger, danger, with every stressor and change of scenery. So smell something, touch something, fidget with something. I would make sure that there are things to fidget with at every desk of every employee at your company. You will maximize productivity when you can kind of calm down the survival brain with physical sensations. 
    
6. How Women of Color Can Redefine Corporate Power with Deepa Purushothaman
   Women of color are in a moment when we are questioning if we want to stay in these corporate structures and workplaces in general. Many of us are leaving to create businesses that have cultures that see and recognize us. We need to stay in these structures and make them better, because the data shows as the workplace becomes more diverse, it becomes stronger. What’s at stake for leaders is that if you don’t find ways to keep us, you’re going to lose our insights and innovation.
    
7. How to Do Hard Things the Human Way with Jacqueline Carter
   Hard conversations require time. Giving people feedback and then having to leave immediately afterwards without giving them a chance to respond will not get you positive results. Make sure that your schedule isn’t booked back to back, and create space for that person to respond.
    
8. Full Out: Leadership Lessons with Global Netflix Sensation Monica Aldama
   When people feel noticed, heard, and appreciated, you can get a lot more out of them than people even realize. We all want to feel appreciated and feel seen. The way that you treat people will ultimately lead to what you're able to get out of them. Respect cannot be demanded, no matter how much you yell or criticize, and if you think those power words are making you more powerful, they're not. They're just disconnecting you from the people that you're trying to lead.
    
9. How to Unlock Strategic Innovation by Reimagining Design with Kevin G. Bethune
   Play, creativity, and willingness to fail is imperative for today’s business owners. Have the creative courage to take a step forward, experiment, workshop, and rewire your organization to create a little bit more capacity for strategic innovation conversations. Invite more voices around the table. Look at the team makeup and ensure that you’re championing diversity, equity, inclusion. Take creative, optimistic actions that you might not have considered doing in previous circumstances, and see what comes about.
    
10. How Big Ethical Questions Can Supercharge Your Relationships with Susan Liautaud
    No CEO can know everything that's going on in a workplace, but they can be responsible for the ethics infrastructure and culture that is put in place. Choose one particular ethics objective for every team and manager's performance evaluation. This will allow the CEO to be responsible for oversight, making sure there's proper auditing in place, and doing everything possible to create a culture where people feel free to speak up if they have concerns. Organizational ethics work is about trying to deter and trying to detect early.
     
11. How to Master Superior Management with Roger L. Martin
    The population in general is asking more of corporations today. The era of having winners and losers is over. For example, Walmart is now doing a much better job than it was 10 or 15 years ago in this. It used to be, if we can win, even though many of our employees are living below the poverty line doing precarious work, that’s fine. That’s gone. You can’t get away with that as a corporation anymore. Over the next five to ten years there will be more regulations to stop them from behaving that way, and corporations need to prepare for that.

So Media, Meta, and PR Firms Are Crooked according to Washington Post Article?

 Not linking for obvious reasons when Washington Post showcases how crooked even they are and Elon Musk blasts them for "Democracy Dies Behind a Paywall": https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/facebook-tiktok-targeted-victory/

This recent story showcases the length that companies will go to squash out competition and kill competitors through the media. I won't comment on the Hilary Clinton Lawsuit claiming the DNC paid a law firm to dig up dirt on her competitor but will just say of course they would pay a law firm for this.

A crooked and con man Evan Nierman who runs Red Banyan that was sued for Assault, Battery, and Defamation as you can see here: https://unicourt.com/case/fl-mda3-amit-raizada-vs-red-banyan-group-llc-474658

So back to my note taking. Meta paid a PR firm thats owned by The Stagwell Group which also owns Reputation Defender (an online reputation management company) and they were tasked with getting the media to portray TikTok as a dangerous and bad app showcasing it's dangers and even getting senators to call hearings regarding the use of TikTok.

The thing is the article makes it look like journalists and opinion pieces were persuaded by a paid media company to cover an article in order to influence the public's view of TikTok. We deal with this every day with influential articles trying to sway opinion and when can we ever know now whether it's a legitimate article or it was just planted there because of some extortion racket? Sadly we won't ever know for sure so remember that next time you read a negative article or see a lawsuit listed online. Know that it's probably planted there for somebody else's financial gain and motives. That is the sad truth.

Vox Media & Rich Ruddie

Rich Ruddie profile and small biography is up on Vox Media now. We were seeing if Vox media and their properties would open up comments and tie them into profiles as a way to test for future contributors on a user generated content portion of their site.

Possible this is an old profile setup as there are no current comments on Vox properties available. Maybe a liability issue on their side?

https://www.voxmedia.com/users/richruddie

GDPR Violation for Using Google Fonts

 Things continue to heat up with the GDPR issues that Google is running into. First with the Austrian board over Google Analytics and now there's issues over embedding fonts. Read more here: https://thehackernews.com/2022/01/german-court-rules-websites-embedding.html

The Missing Tinder Swindler Story

 

Israeli 'King of Diamonds' Leviev's Son and Relative Among Those Arrested in Smuggling Case 

Leviev's companies are allegedly at the center of a vast diamond-smuggling ring that has operated for years

Gur Megiddo

Nov 06, 2018 5:10 PM

  The names of the six suspects arrested Monday as part of a probe into suspected diamond smuggling in which Israeli tycoon Lev Leviev is implicated were made public on Tuesday. One of the suspects is Leviev's... 

 

This is the story that was featured in the Netflix Special The Tinder Swindler where Simon Leviev sent to his victims. Shimon Yehuda Hayut then leads to the Finnish article about some of his crimes.  The Haaretz.com article by Gur Megiddo has since been deleted and is behind a paywall using a backdoor research site I use.

Future of Outsoucring

 If you are looking for the future of outsourcing and a potential global competitor to Linkedin check out the website Wantedly that I reference below. Along with some other random sites I've recently found old profiles of mine on.

 

https://www.wantedly.com/id/richart_ruddie

https://unsplash.com/@richartruddie

https://www.deviantart.com/richartruddie

https://issuu.com/richruddie/docs/richart_ruddie_art_collection https://issuu.com/home/published/richart_ruddie_art_collection

https://issuu.com/richruddie/docs/richart_ruddie_art_collection

New York Times Covers Accountability

 The New York Times one of the most reliable newspapers and the namesake for New York City's Time's Sqaure covered Accountability and admitting when you're wrong in their morning newsletter. This is the take from top experts:

Taking stock

Jennifer Nuzzo is a health expert who has become nationally prominent during the pandemic. She is the leading epidemiologist for Johns Hopkins University’s much-cited data collection on Covid-19 testing. She is active on Twitter and quoted frequently in the media. She can explain complex ideas in clear terms, and she has often been prophetic about Covid.

Nonetheless, she took to Twitter last May to criticize herself. She had expected Texas’ ending of its mask mandate to lead to a surge in cases, and it had not:

Nuzzo’s small exercise in self accountability highlighted the inherent unpredictability of this virus. (Masks do reduce its spread, but the effect can be too modest to be visible across an entire community or state.) Her tweet made a larger point, too: People with a public platform should be willing to admit when they’re wrong.

There is no shame in being wrong at times. Everybody is, including knowledgeable experts. The world is a messy, uncertain place. The only way to be right all the time is to be silent or say nothing interesting.

The problem isn’t that people make mistakes; it’s that so few are willing to admit it.

Many experts instead post aggrandizing praise of themselves on social media. They claim that each new development — be it on Covid, the economy, politics or foreign affairs — justifies what they’ve been saying all along. They don’t grapple with the weak points in their arguments and hope nobody notices their past incorrect predictions.

We journalists commit the same sins. More than a decade ago, in an effort to do better, David Weigel of Slate (and now of The Washington Post) introduced a concept he called “pundit accountability.” It describes articles in which journalists highlight their own mistakes — and not small factual errors, which often get corrected, but errors of analysis, which don’t.

Today’s newsletter is my annual attempt at pundit accountability. Below, I’ll link to other writers who have written similar articles in recent weeks.

Looking back on the past year of Morning newsletters made me feel proud of our coverage, especially on Covid, and I’m grateful to the many readers who have come to rely on the newsletter. But that’s enough self-aggrandizement. As Nuzzo would say, accountability time.

1. Breakthroughs

I, too, underestimated the unpredictability of the virus.

Before the Delta variant emerged, infections among vaccinated people — known as breakthrough infections — were rare. I assumed that the pattern would probably continue throughout 2021. If it had, huge new waves of infection, like the current one, would have been impossible.

Instead, Delta led to an increase in breakthrough infections, and Omicron has led to a larger increase. Symptoms are usually mild, but they can lead to bad outcomes for a small share of vaccinated people whose health is already vulnerable, like the elderly. The surge of breakthrough infections means Covid often still dominates everyday life.

I have since tried to absorb the lesson of Covid’s uncertainty and have emphasized it in more recent newsletters. As Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota — who has long emphasized Covid’s unavoidable unknowns — has said, “We still are really in the cave ages in terms of understanding how viruses emerge, how they spread, how they start and stop, why they do what they do.”

2. Waning immunity

I was too skeptical of the early signs of waning vaccine immunity and the importance of boosters.

Toward the end of the summer, some researchers began pointing to data suggesting that the power of vaccines waned after about six months. Other researchers doubted that case, saying that the data was unclear — and that pharmaceutical companies had an obvious incentive to promote waning immunity and boosters. But the case for boosters now seems clear.

Amid uncertain evidence, I try to avoid automatically assuming the worst. Often, that’s the right approach. (A lot of early Covid alarmism — about the virus’s effect on children, the contagiousness of Delta and the severity of Omicron, for instance — has proved to be misplaced.) Sometimes, though, the ominous signs are the ones worth heeding.

Another lesson: The quality of Covid data in the U.S. is poor, often clouding early judgments. It can make sense to look to Israel, where the data is better. Experts there quickly recognized that waning immunity was real. Other accountability “I think it’s really important for the media and for other institutions like the C.D.C. to build trust by being honest about when they got things wrong,” Derek Thompson of The Atlantic said on The Bill Simmons Podcast. Thompson’s own mea culpa: underestimating breakthrough infections. My colleague Shira Ovide asked tech experts to describe their misplaced forecasts, including over-optimism about self-driving cars. Matthew Yglesias of Substack listed all the 2021 predictions he got wrong, including whether a Supreme Court justice would retire. Damon Linker of The Week underestimated the seriousness of Jan. 6 and said he didn’t praise Liz Cheney enough. Derek Robertson of Politico wrongly thought that President Biden could help end the culture wars, and Doyle McManus of The Los Angeles Times was too optimistic about Biden’s first year. Karl Rove, who writes a Wall Street Journal column, said that he went 17.5 for 25 in his 2021 predictions, while three Vox writers said they went 13 for 22.