This week in the USA, Hola Magazine hit the stands featuring an interview with Forrest Kolb, founder of the LOVE ANGELES PROJECT. In the article, Forrest explains how and why he intends to run for the office of Mayor of Los Angeles in 2013. Get your Spanish translation book out;)
Source: TED - In 1987, at the age of 26 and seeking a little "joy of life," Chip Conley founded Joie de Vivre Hospitality by transforming a small motel in San Francisco’s seedy Tenderloin district into the now-legendary Phoenix. Today, Joie de Vivre operates nearly 40 unique hotels across California, each built on an innovative design formula that inspires guests to experience an "identity refreshment" during their visits.
During the dotcom bust in 2001, Conley found himself in the self-help section of the bookstore, where he became reacquainted with one of the most famous theories of human behavior -- Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which separates human desires into five ascending levels, from base needs such as eating to the highest goal of self-actualization, characterized by the full realization and achievement of one’s potential. Influenced by Maslow's pyramid, Conley revamped his business model to focus on the intangible, higher needs of his company's three main constituencies -- employees, customers and investors. He credits this shift for helping Joie de Vivre triple its annual revenues between 2001 and 2008.
Conley has written three books, including his most recent, PEAK: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow, and is at work on two new ones, Emotional Equations and PEAK Leadership. He consults widely on transformative enterprises, corporate social responsibility and creative business development. He traveled to Bhutan last year to study its Gross National Happiness index, the country's unique method of measuring success and its citizens' quality of life.
"Chip Conley is that rare breed of CEO who possesses both a brilliant business mind and a very big heart. He’s a true role model for anyone who wants to lead." - Gavin Newsom, Mayor of San Francisco
By Randy Lewis - The 59-year-old rocker's first album with the Heartbreakers since 2002
has him so pleased that he's taking the boys on tour too. But they
won't reach L.A. until the fall.
Tom Petty casually rolled back the sliding glass door at his rustic beach house in Malibu and stepped out onto the deck for a clear look at the waves crashing on the sand a dozen yards away. Surveying the picture-perfect blue sky and sparkling water to match, the 59-year-old rocker took in the view surrounding him and couldn't help noticing two young women sunbathing topless in front of the house next to his.
The record business may be in disarray, but on days like this, it's still good to be a rock star — a job Petty has fulfilled admirably for more than 30 years now.
A couple of decades earlier things might have transpired differently, but on this day, Petty simply cracked a wry smile at the scene next door and stepped back inside. He had other things on his mind, chiefly his new album, "Mojo," which hits stores Tuesday. He left the beach in the care of his wife of nearly a decade, Dana, who pulled up a chair to soak up some sun while her husband turned his attention to his first love, music.
Atop a coffee table near the living room window was a copy of Greil Marcus' new book about Van Morrison, one of Petty's musical heroes.
"I haven't got around to it yet," he said, adding with a laugh: "I haven't had a lot of time to read." That's because he's been busy finishing "Mojo," his first album with the Heartbreakers since 2002's "The Last DJ," and gearing up for a tour that commenced last week. (It doesn't reach the Southland until fall.)
"I always thought that when I got around to the Heartbreakers making another record, that I'd like it really to represent the band that they've grown into," said Petty, his dirty-blond hair a bit shorter than usual, barely reaching the collar of the white Oxford shirt under a black vest that's part of his signature look.
"The band has kind of matured into something else," he said, more with the air of an impartial observer than you might expect of the man who has fronted that band on (mostly) and off (periodically) for 35 years. "This is more the way we play for ourselves when the heat's off; this is what it sounds like. And I thought, number one, it would be more fun, and, number two, it would just be truer to what we really are at the moment. They're a ridiculously good band. I'm still sometimes awed by them."
And why not? The Heartbreakers have emerged over time as arguably the quintessential American rock band, more endearingly human than the studio-perfect Eagles, more consistently in touch with the fundamentals of rock 'n' roll than the musically expansive E Street Band.
"They are the definition of what a real rock 'n' roll band is supposed to be," said Jim Ladd, the veteran rock radio DJ, who will host Petty on his KLOS-FM (95.5) show Monday night. "[They] started in a garage in Gainesville, Fla., and stuck it out through all the hard times, and they never lost sight of their goal, which was, I think for them, not to be celebrities but to be great musicians."
"Mojo" offers a showcase for the empathetic interplay among Petty and fellow guitarists Mike Campbell and Scott Thurston, keyboardist Benmont Tench, bassist Ron Blair and drummer Steve Ferrone. It's a rootsy, blues-drenched outing for the singer-songwriter and his longtime partners.
"I had this picture in my mind of making a record that had something in common spiritually with the Chess blues records, even the English blues bands of the late-'60s: [ John] Mayall, Peter Green," he said. "That's the stuff that really just kills me."
It's apparent in "Candy," a grizzled, back-porch blues that John Lee Hooker might have tackled, and in the haunting, "Hellhound on My Trail"-inspired "Takin' My Time."
"I love that [old blues] stuff because they're really strong songs, but it doesn't sound like they're trying really hard," he said.
"Everyone thinks they can knock off a 12-bar [blues], but to do it right takes a little time and you have to mature a little bit. I don't think we could have made this record in the '80s. I don't think our heads were in that spot.
"This is something that happened now, and I'm glad," he said. "I don't think I could have hired the best studio guys and thrown this stuff at them. … I think only a band could have done this."
Except for Thurston, who came aboard in 1991, and Ferrone, who took over from Stan Lynch three years later, the Heartbreakers have known one another and played together since they were teenagers in Gainesville.
The many ups and downs they've weathered together — famously suing their record company while working on "Damn the Torpedoes"; a 1987 arson fire that destroyed Petty's Encino home; Petty's loyalty-testing recordings apart from the band; the 2003 death of bassist Howie Epstein — have forged a band-of-brothers bond that Petty clearly prizes.
"You just can't buy that for any amount of money — it's something you've got to cultivate over a period of time, and in this case, a long period of time," he said. Working with the band once again on "Mojo," he added, "was a satisfying trip. It was, to me, similar to the Mudcrutch thing, in that I was really happy to listen to it after it was over…. I hated to stop [writing and recording] really, because I felt like we were really on a roll there."
So why did it take eight years between Heartbreakers albums?
"I don't even know how that happened really," he said, sounding genuinely perplexed. Then he started to recount the various projects that gobbled up those years: his third solo album, 2006's "Highway Companion"; the band's collaboration with director Peter Bogdanovich on the four-hour "Runnin' Down a Dream" film documentary; his decision to regroup for an album and tour with Mudcrutch, the Florida band that preceded the Heartbreakers.
Additionally, Petty said, "For a while there I didn't feel like I had the material for them. I didn't want to do a Heartbreakers record unless it was going to be kind of special and good. I think we all just had an understanding about it. No one ever complained about it. We just knew that when the time was right, we'd do it again."
That may be the real mojo that is the Heartbreakers.
"I think we all respect the band maybe in a way that's bigger than our individual selves," Petty said. "We really respect the trip and we want to mine it for all it's worth. It's a good little band."
Source: INC.com - Tony Hsieh built his online shoe retailer into an e-commerce powerhouse. But with credit tightening and investors eyeing the exits, Hsieh was forced to ask: Was selling Zappos really the only way to save it?
The first time Amazon.com tried to buy Zappos, we said no without even thinking.
It was the summer of 2005, and Zappos, the start-up into which I'd poured the past five years of my life (and almost all of my money), finally seemed to be on the right track.
Zappos sells shoes and apparel online, but what distinguished us from our competitors was that we'd put our company culture above all else. We'd bet that by being good to our employees -- for instance, by paying for 100 percent of health care premiums, spending heavily on personal development, and giving customer service reps more freedom than at a typical call center -- we would be able to offer better service than our competitors. Better service would translate into lots of repeat customers, which would mean low marketing expenses, long-term profits, and fast growth. Amazingly, it all seemed to be working. By 2005, gross merchandise sales were $370 million, and we made the Inc. 500. We weren't profitable yet, but we were close to breaking even, and our revenue was growing quickly.
At the time, we made almost all our money selling shoes, but our hope was that we'd eventually go into all sorts of other businesses. We saw Zappos as a global brand like Virgin -- except whereas Virgin was about being hip and cool, Zappos would be about offering the best service. The plan was to grow sales to $1 billion by 2010 and eventually go public.
These ideas about the power of our company culture had yet to be proved. As I talked to Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who visited our headquarters in 2005, I realized that to Amazon, we were just a leading shoe company. If we sold, we'd probably be folded into their operations, and our brand and culture would be at risk of disappearing.
That was why we told Jeff that we weren't interested in selling at any price. I felt like we were just getting started.
Four years later, Amazon came calling again -- and again my impulse was to say no. Our sales had grown steadily since 2005; by 2008 we were doing more than $1 billion in gross merchandise sales annually -- two years ahead of our original plan. We were now profitable, and our culture was even stronger. As before, our plan was to stay independent and eventually go public.
But our board of directors had other ideas. Although I'd financed much of Zappos myself during its early days, we'd eventually raised tens of millions of dollars from outside investors, including $48 million from Sequoia Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. As with all VCs, Sequoia expected a substantial return on its investment -- most likely through an IPO. It might have been happy to wait a few more years if the economy had been thriving, but the recession and the credit crisis had put Zappos -- and our investors -- in a very precarious position.
At the time, Zappos relied on a revolving line of credit of $100 million to buy inventory. But our lending agreements required us to hit projected revenue and profitability targets each month. If we missed our numbers even by a small amount, the banks had the right to walk away from the loans, creating a possible cash-flow crisis that might theoretically bankrupt us. In early 2009, there weren't a lot of banks eager to give out $100 million to a business in our situation.
That wasn't our only potential cash-flow problem. Our line of credit was "asset backed," meaning that we could borrow between 50 percent and 60 percent of the value of our inventory. But the value of our inventory wasn't based on what we'd paid. It was based on the amount of money we could reasonably collect if the company were liquidated. As the economy deteriorated, the appraised value of our inventory began to fall, which meant that even if we hit our numbers, we might eventually find ourselves without enough cash to buy inventory.
These issues had nothing to do with the underlying performance of our business, but they increased tensions on our board of directors. Some board members had always viewed our company culture as a pet project -- "Tony's social experiments," they called it. I disagreed. I believe that getting the culture right is the most important thing a company can do. But the board took the conventional view -- namely, that a business should focus on profitability first and then use the profits to do nice things for its employees. The board's attitude was that my "social experiments" might make for good PR but that they didn't move the overall business forward. The board wanted me, or whoever was CEO, to spend less time on worrying about employee happiness and more time selling shoes.
On some level, I was sympathetic to the board's position. The truth was that if we pulled back on the culture stuff, the immediate effect on our financials would probably have been positive. It would have reduced our expenses in the short term, and I don't think our sales would have suffered much at first. But I was pretty sure that in the long term, it would have ruined everything we had created.
By early 2009, we were at a stalemate. Because of a complicated legal structure, I effectively controlled the majority of the common shares, so that the board couldn't force a sale of the company. But on the five-person board, only two of us -- Alfred Lin, our CFO and COO, and myself -- were completely committed to Zappos's culture. This made it likely that if the economy didn't improve, the board would fire me and hire a new CEO who was concerned only with maximizing profits. The threat was never made overtly, but I could tell that was the direction things were going.
It was a stressful time for me and Alfred. But we'd gotten through much tougher times before, and this seemed like just another challenge we needed to figure out. We began brainstorming ways that we could get out from under the board. We certainly didn't want to sell the company and move on to something else. To us, Zappos wasn't just a job -- it was a calling. So we came up with a plan: We would buy out our board of directors.
We figured to do so would cost about $200 million. As we were talking to potential investors, Amazon approached Alfred about buying Zappos outright. Although that still didn't seem like the best option to me, Alfred sensed that Amazon would be more open than last time to the idea of letting Zappos continue to operate as an independent entity. And we felt that the price Amazon was talking about was too large for us to ignore without potentially violating our fiduciary duty to our shareholders.
In April, I flew to Seattle for an hourlong meeting with Jeff Bezos. I gave him my standard presentation on Zappos, which is mostly about our culture. Toward the end of the presentation, I started talking about the science of happiness -- and how we try to use it to serve our customers and employees better.
Source: Examiner - “There's been some question as to why I'm here,” Costner told the House Energy and Environment subcommittee on Wednesday. “I want to assure everyone here it's not because I heard a voice in a cornfield,” Costner said joking about the Field of Dreams movie he made several years ago.
Costner said that over the years he has had a difficult time getting any interest in buying the machines. He said he performed for the Coast Guard, private companies, and the government, but no one was interested.
“My enthusiasm for the machine was met with apathy,” said Costner.
But in May, BP asked for 6 of Costner’s machines to be flown to the Gulf to be tested. And now BP has ordered 32 of the machines because they have an almost 100% success rate in separating oil from ocean water. The machines, marketed by Ocean Therapy Solutions take in the oily water and recycle the water. 32 machines will process about 6 million gallons of water each day.
Costner said “that as long as the oil industry profits from the sea, they have an obligation to protect it.” He went on to say that the cleaning devices “should be on every ship transporting oil, they should be on every derrick, they should be in every harbor.”
“There's 33 platforms that are shut down,” said Costner. “We can put Americans back to work and bring into the 21st century the technology of oil spill recovery.”
Last Friday, Obama cancelled his business trip to Asia and headed back down to the Gulf Coast. Thursday night, Obama told Larry King that he was "furious with the entire situation."
Recently, a new video of the gushing oil had many of the investigative teams calling BP untrustworthy because more oil was leaking from the well then they originally claimed.
The state of Utah has 28 oil drilling companies throughout the state. Two years ago President Bush allowed oil drilling to be done near two national parks, much to the dismay of many Utah residents. According to a ABC News report Wednesday night, oil drilling isn’t considered safe in the US because the government has not ordered the same safety requirements in oil drilling that other countries require, and residents near the oil drilling are typically distraught.
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Source: ecorazzi.com - Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has released a video featuring actor, director, and environmentalist Robert Redford about the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster called “The Fix.”
Redford, an NRDC trustee for more than thirty years, encourages Americans to move toward clean energy. He says, “The economic consequences are going to spread over the whole country but maybe we need it to be that bad to wake us up and put pressure on these companies and the government.”
During the five minute video, Redford reflects on his time as a youth when he worked in the oil fields and he reveals his frustration when energy companies claim to be conversationalists. The actor also talks about the devastation that occurred from past oil spills including the Exxon Valdez disaster.
The 73 year old says that despite the disaster we will continue hearing that offshore drilling is necessary—bringing energy and creating jobs—“but it’s not the truth.”
“I think the oil spill is going to at least help us get to the truth and then what? I think it’s time for American people to take charge of their own livelihood and say let’s stop this, let’s move to a clean energy policy which is available to us.”
Individuals are encouraged to tell their senators to pass energy legislation that will prevent future oil spills by sending a letter from the NRDC website.
“If there’s a lesson in all of this, it’s that we have to get off of our dependence on oil,” says Redford.
Source: Dosomethinggood.org - Environmental advocate Jack Johnson is about to set out on a world tour... and eco-friendly world tour! Like his last tour, Johnson will donate 100 percent of his profits to charities that support the environment, arts education, and music education. And of course, the tour buses will run on biodiesel fuel! Profits from his 2008 tour created the Johnson Ohana Charitable Foundation, which currently matches donations made to organizations partnered with All At Once.
By: BINAJ GURUBACHARYA - The 13-year-old American boy who became the youngest person to climb Mount Everest announced plans Thursday for an ascent later this year of Mount Cho Oyu, the world's sixth highest peak.
Jordan Romero, from Big Bear, California, told reporters Thursday in Katmandu that he plans to climb the 8,201-meter (26,906-foot) peak during the autumn climbing season. Cho Oyu straddles the Nepal-China border.
Nepal prohibits people under the age of 16 from climbing high mountain peaks, but there is no such restriction in China. Romero scaled the 29,035-foot (8,850-meter) Mount Everest last weekend from the northern side of the peak in China. He arrived in Nepal on Wednesday.
Romero is on a quest to climb the highest mountain on each of the seven continents, and plans to scale the final one on his list -- the 16,076-foot (4,900-meter) Vinson Massif in Antarctica -- during the winter. Cho Oyu, considered one of the easier climbs among the world's highest mountains, is not on that list.
Romero said the Everest expedition went smoothly despite the team battling with high winds.
"I definitely do encourage younger people to go big. I encourage other people to climb Everest and especially younger children just to go big," Romero said.
He said one of the difficulties was moving across the rocky surface near the summit.
Climbers have complained recently that melting glacial ice has exposed a rocky surface, making it difficult to move with crampons best suited for ice. Rising temperatures on the mountain due to global warming have been blamed for the melting ice.
Source: TED - Why don't we get the best out of people? Sir Ken Robinson argues that it's because we've been educated to become good workers, rather than creative thinkers. Students with restless minds and bodies -- far from being cultivated for their energy and curiosity -- are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible consequences. "We are educating people out of their creativity," Robinson says. It's a message with deep resonance. Robinson's TEDTalk has been distributed widely around the Web since its release in June 2006. The most popular words framing blog posts on his talk? "Everyone should watch this."
A visionary cultural leader, Sir Ken led the British government's 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultural education, a massive inquiry into the significance of creativity in the educational system and the economy, and was knighted in 2003 for his achievements. His latest book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, a deep look at human creativity and education, was published in January 2009.
"Ken's vision and expertise is sought by public and commercial organizations throughout the world." - BBC Radio 4
Source: ecorazzi - On May 24, Jack Johnson will take over the Santa Monica Pier to promote the release of his latest album To The Sea and raise awareness for the environmental organization Heal The Bay. Previously, free concert tickets were up for grabs for the first 2000 people to commit to a 2-hour beach cleanup on May 22.
Those who missed out on the volunteer signup can still win tickets through May 23 by following @jackjohnson and @brushfire on Twitter. Additionally, Johnson encourages fans to join Heal the Bay in their efforts to keep California beaches free of garbage by participating in the organization’s monthly cleanup programs.
To The Sea, which will be released on June 1, was recorded at the Mango Tree in Hawaii and the Solar Powered Plastic Plant in Los Angeles—both solar-powered studios. The Santa Monica Pier concert kicks off Johnson’s summer tour. As with the 2008 tour, Jack Johnson will once again donate 100% of his 2010 tour profits to charity.
