“Initiative is taken, it’s not given.”

yuujou, the Japanese word for friendship

Seth Godin said it and I agree with him.

Over a two-year period (1908-1910), on an assignment for Andrew Carnegie, Napoleon Hill interviewed the most successful people in the world to learn what they shared in common. What was it?

The most successful people go “the extra mile.”

Think about that.

• They didn’t wait to be asked.
• They didn’t ask for permission.
• No one made them do it.
• Something needed to be done and done right.
• And they did it as best they could.
• They didn’t expect praise or recognition…and usually didn’t get it.

Almost always, they “went the extra mile” for someone else.

Out there, somewhere, someone needs your help now.

What are you waiting for?

Roger Ebert’s “The best feature films of 2010″

Roger Ebert remains among my favorite film critics on a very short list that begins with James Agee. Despite several severe health issues, Ebert’s abundant rain and insatiable curiosity are as active as ever. His published works include The Great Movies III, Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook 2010, and The Pot and How to Use It. Volumes I and II of The Great Movies and Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert can also be ordered via the links in the right column of rogerebert.com. During the last 12 months, that website had 106 million views.

Prior to the awards presentations in 2011, Ebert posted his own list of what he views as “The best feature films of 2010.” Here are his selections 6-10.

To read the complete list, please click here.

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David Fincher’s The Social Network is emerging as the consensus choice as best film of 2010. Most of the critics’ groups have sanctified it, and after its initial impact it has only grown it stature. I think it is an early observer of a trend in our society, where we have learned new ways of thinking of ourselves: As members of a demographic group, as part of a database, as figures in…a social network.

My best films list also appears on my main site, but I am posting it here on the blog so that you can comment on it. In response to the reader protests of recent years, I’ve returned to the time-honored tradition of ten films arranged in order from one to ten. After that, it’s all alphabetical. The notion of objectively ordering works of art seems bizarre to me.

Here are [five of the] the year’s [ten] best feature films:

6. Inception: A movie set within the architecture of dreams. The film’s hero (Leonardo DiCaprio) challenges a young architect (Ellen Page) to create such fantasy spaces as part of his raids on the minds of corporate rivals. The movie is all about process, about fighting our way through enveloping sheets of reality and dream, reality within dreams, dreams without reality. It’s a breathtaking juggling act by writer-director Christopher Nolan, who spent 10 years devising the labyrinthine script.

Do dreams “have” an architecture? Well, they require one for the purposes of this brilliantly visualized movie. For some time now, I’ve noticed that every dream I awaken from involves a variation of me urgently trying to return somewhere by taking a half-remembered way through streets and buildings. Sometimes I know my destination (I get off a ship and catch a train but am late for a flight and not packed). Sometimes I’m in a vast hotel. Sometimes crossing the University of Illinois campus, which has greatly changed. In every case, my attempt is to follow an abstract path (turn down here and cut across and come back up) which I could map for you. Inception led me to speculate that my mind, at least, generates architectural pathways, and that one reason I responded to Inception is that , like all movies, it was a waking dream.

7. The Secret in their Eyes: This 2009 film from Argentina won the Academy Award for best foreign film of 2010. But it opened in 2010 in the U.S., and so certainly qualifies. It spans the years between 1974 and 2000 in Buenos Aries, as a woman who is a judge and a man who is a retired criminal investigator meet after 26 years. In 1974 they were associated on a case of rape and murder, and the man still believes the wrong men were convicted of the crime. The whole case is bound up in the right wing regime of those days, and the “disappearances” of enemies of the state.

Although the criminal story is given full weight, writer-director Juan Jose Campanella is more involved in the romantic charge between his two characters. No, this isn’t a silly movie love story. These are adults–experienced, nuanced, survivors. Love has very high stakes for them, and therefore greater rewards. Soledad Villamil and Ricardo Darin have presence and authority that makes their scenes together emotionally meaningful, as beneath the surface old secrets coil.

8. The American: George Clooney plays an enigmatic man whose job is creating specialized weapons for specialized murders. He builds them, delivers the, and disappears. Now someone wants him to disappear for good. A standard thriller plot, but this is a far from mainstream thriller. Very little is explained. There is a stark minimalism at work. Much depends on our empathy. The entire drama rests on two words, “Mr. Butterfly.” We must be vigilant to realize that once, and only once, are they spoken by the wrong person — and then the whole plot reality rotates.

A few of my colleagues admired this film by Anton Corbijn very much. Most of them admired it very little. I received demands from readers that I refund their money, and messages agreeing that there was greatness here. The American reminded me of Le Samourai (1967) by Jean-Pierre Melville, which starred another handsome man (Alain Delon) in the role of an enigmatic murder professional. The film sees dispassionately, guards its secrets, and ends like a clockwork mechanism arriving at its final, clarifying tick.

9. Kids Are All Right: There are ways to read that title: Kids in general are all right, thee particular kids are all right, and it is all right for lesbians to form a family and raise them. Each mother bore one of the children, and because the same anonymous sperm donor was used, they’re half-siblings. The mothers and long-time partners are played by Julianne Moore and Annette Bening, and like many couples, they’re going through a little mid-life crisis.

Their children (Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson) unexpectedly contact their birth father (Mark Ruffalo), and the women are startled to find him back in their lives. It was all supposed to be a one-time pragmatic relationship. Ruffalo plays him as a hippie-ish organic gardener for whom “laid back” is a moral choice. He thinks it’s cool to meet his kids, it’s cool their moms are married, it’s cool they invite him for dinner. I mean…sure, yes, of course…I mean, why not? Sure. In a comedy with some deeper colors, the film is an affirmation of–family values.

10. The Ghost Writer: In Roman Polanski’s best film in years, a man without a past rattles around in the life of a man with too much of one. A ghost writer (Ewan McGregor) is hired to write the autobiography of a former British Prime Minister so inspired by Tony Blair that he might as well be wearing a name tag. He comes to stay at an isolated country house like those in the Agatha Christie mysteries, in which everyone is a potential suspect. His wife Ruth (Olivia Williams), smart and bitter, met Lang at Cambridge. His assistant Amelia (Kim Cattrall), smart and devious, is having an affair with him. The writer comes across information that suggests much of what he sees is a lie, and his life may be in danger.

This movie is the work of a man who knows how to direct a thriller. Smooth, calm, confident, it builds suspense instead of depending on shock and action. The actors create characters who suggest intriguing secrets. The atmosphere — a rain-swept Martha’s Vineyard in winter — has an ominous, gray chill, and the main interior looks just as cold. The key performances are measured for effect, not ramped up for effect. In an age of dumbed-down thrillers, this one evokes a classic tradition.

George Friedman (The Next Decade) Raises The Issue Of The Decade

People with a high level of personal mastery are acutely aware of their ignorance, their incompetence, and their growth areas.
Peter Senge

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Here is a question – when the news could be bad, do you want to know? Think about it carefully before you answer…

George Friedman, founder of Stratfor, is the author of The Next Decade:  Where We’ve Been…and Where We’re Going.  It is the follow-up to an earlier book, The Next 100 Years.  It raises many important questions, especially how the United States can maintain its values while managing its status as an empire.

But buried in the book is a question for all of us.  Here are two quotes from the book to get us to this question:

(this first quote flows from his reflections of the 2008 financial crisis):
Everyone was making money and no one could get hurt – it was the oldest story in the book.  And most people didn’t care or didn’t want to believe that the bubble could burst.
and
Americans like to hold everyone responsible for the problems of the United States but themselves.

There is an underlying truth here. Maybe it is a human truth – i.e., true for all people.  Maybe it is somewhat uniquely American.  I’m not sure.  But I know it is true for me.

I don’t want to know the bad that I need to change.   The bad habits; the bad views; the bad opinions; the bad practices.  I would just as soon be “left alone.”

Now this is strange, because I have written and spoken frequently on the need to be honest with ourselves regarding our areas of concern, our areas of weakness.  I believe that we must discover our blind spots, and fix what can be (must be!) fixed..

But, I suspect if you corner me, what I really believe is that you should discover your blind spots.  You should discover your weaknesses, and work on them.  Just don’t tell me what mine are….

So, I plead guilty. Friedman is right – at least, about me.  We “don’t want to believe” that the bubble could burst – whatever the bubble of the day/month/year/lifetime is for our own lives.

Josiah Bunting’s biography of Grant: A book review by Bob Morris

Ulysses S. Grant: The American Presidents Series: The 18th President, 1869-1877
Josiah Bunting
Times Books (2004)

Every year about this time, probably because of Presidents Day, I re-read brief biographies. This year, I selected Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885), 18th President of the United States. Bunting’s one of the two, the other written by Michael Korda and included among the volumes that comprise the Atlas Books/HarperCollins’ “Eminent Lives” series, with James Atlas serving as general editor. Although both cover much of the same material, there are significant differences between their authors’ respective approaches to the18th president of the United States.

For example, Korda duly acknowledges the problems that awaited Grant after he was elected to his first term in 1869. “What did Grant’s reputation as a president in, however, (and continues to do so today whenever journalists and historians are drawing up lists of the best presidents vs. the worst ones), was the depression of 1873, which ushered in a long period of unemployment and distress, made politically more damaging by accusations that the president’s wealthy friends were making money out of it.” Given that the United States was growing too fast, in too many different directions at once, and the inevitable consequence was corruption and an unstable economy, it would have taken a more astute man than Grant to slow things down or clean them up.”

It is soon obvious in this volume that Bunting disagrees with, indeed resents the fact that Grant is generally remembered “as a general, not a president, [which] explains in part the condescension – there is no better word for it — from which pundits and historians have tended to write of him.” Bunting asserts that if judged by the consequences of Grant’s common sense, judgment, and intuition, his presidency, “so far from being one of the nation’s worst, may yet be seen as one of the best.”

Korda indicates no inclination to view Grant’s presidency as “one of the best.” He duly acknowledges the problems that awaited Grant after he was elected to his first term in 1869. “What did Grant’s reputation as a president in, however, (and continues to do so today whenever journalists and historians are drawing up lists of the best presidents vs. the worst ones), was the depression of 1873, which ushered in a long period of unemployment and distress, made politically more damaging by accusations that the president’s wealthy friends were making money out of it.” Given that the United States was growing too fast, in too many different directions at once, and the inevitable consequence was corruption and an unstable economy, “it would have taken a more astute man than Grant to slow things down or clean them up.”

This last observation by Korda is consistent with a contemporary assessment of Grant by the Edinburgh Review, one which Brooks Simpson quotes in his own study (Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction 1861-1868), and which Bunting also cites: “To bind up the wounds left by the war, to restore concord to the still distracted Union, to ensure real freedom to the Southern Negro, and full justice to the southern white; these are indeed tasks which might tax the powers of Washington himself or a greater than Washington, if such a man is to be found.”

With all due respect to Grant’s admirable personal qualities, I remain unconvinced by Bunting’s eloquent but – in my judgment – problematic endorsement of Grant’s leadership as president. The same “buck” that stops on a desk on a battlefield in Virginia also stops on a desk in the Oval Office.

Those who share my high regard for this volume are urged to check out Korda’s biography as well as Grant’s Memoirs.

Both Korda and Bunting cite a number of other sources worthy of consideration.

McKinsey conversations with global leaders: Jeroen van der Veer of Shell

Jeroen van der Veer

 

Here is another outstanding interview in the McKinsey Conversations with Global Leaders series. To watch the conversation in a video interactive, or download a PDF of the transcript, please click here.

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The former CEO reflects on the oil industry’s future, as well as management lessons learned over a long career.

Source: Operations Practice

Jeroen van der Veer, former CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, retired on June 30 of this year, bringing to a close his 38 years with the company. In this video, the latest in our interview series McKinsey Conversations with Global Leaders, van der Veer shares his thoughts on the future of oil, prospects for alternative energies, and challenges the industry faces in tackling the problems of climate change. Ivo Bozon, a director in McKinsey’s Amsterdam office, conducted this interview in The Hague in June 2009.

Watch the conversation in our video interactive, or read the transcript below.

Always Close the Loop

Here is another valuable Management Tip of the Day from Harvard Business Review. To sign up for a free subscription, to any/all HBR newsletters, please click here.

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One of the biggest mistakes people make after receiving a favor is failing to follow up. Whether someone gives you advice on a job application or makes an introduction to a colleague or client, be sure to report back what happened.

Did you get the job or get in touch with the friend? Close the loop by sharing the outcome, even if it’s bad news.

The person may be able to help further by making another introduction or suggesting another place to apply.

Plus, by showing the fruits of the favor, you increase the likelihood of receiving more help from the person in the future.

Today’s Management Tip was adapted from “The Biggest Mistake People Make After Receiving a Favor” by Jodi Glickman.

To read the full post and join the discussion, please click here.