on March 7, 2012
by Nikos Chatzis in Business, News,
Comments (0)
( Virgin Atlantic / Richard Branson? / Airline Pictures /)
By Richard Branson / entrepreneur.com
I am incredibly lucky to be able to live in theBritish Virgin Islands, one of the most beautiful spots on the planet. My family?s home is onNeckerIsland, which is both our home and a luxury resort. Here, I?m much more likely to do my thinking in an office hammock rather than an office chair.
Seeing guests exploring the beach reminded me that one of the first charming things visitors to the BVIs see are signs in the airport arrivals area that designate the immigration channels. Unlike the rest of the English-speaking world, here the signs read ?Belongers? and ?Non-Belongers,? rather than ?Residents? and ?Nonresidents.?
Since I became a resident, I?ve come to find the term ?belonger? amazingly powerful. When a nation embraces its own as ?belonging here? as opposed to just living there, it breeds a different form of loyalty. It reminds us that this is where we belong, and so our efforts are not just on our own behalf, but also to benefit the community. / Richard Branson /
This made me think about how such little, seemingly semantic, details apply in the business world: What if companies had belongers rather than employees? Does what we call each other make a difference in other contexts?
Many millions of people proudly claim the title ?entrepreneur.? On the other hand, a title that hasn?t gotten nearly the amount of attention it deserves is entrepreneur?s little brother, ?intrapreneur?: ?an employee who is given freedom and financial support to create new products, services and systems, who does not have to follow the company?s usual routines or protocols.? While it?s true that every company needs an entrepreneur to get it under way, healthy growth requires a smattering of intrapreneurs who drive new projects and explore new and unexpected directions for business development.
Virgin could never have growninto the group of more than 200 companies it is now, were it not for a steady stream of intrapreneurs who looked for and developed opportunities, often leading efforts that went against the grain. / Richard Branson /
How To Unleash The Power Of Intrapreneurs..? / Richard Branson
One example that springs to mind was at Virgin Atlantic, about 10 years ago. None of the big expensive seat design firms seemed able to solve the design problems posed by our specifications for our Upper Class cabin, but a young designer, Joe Ferry, volunteered (insistently) to give the project a go.
We set him loose, and the herringbone-configured private sleeper suites that resulted from his ?outside the box? creativity put us years ahead of the pack and made for millions of very happy horizontal fliers.
How to unleash the power of intrapreneurs like Joe? The key is to enable them to pursue their vision. But people don?t always think of leaders within a company ? the managers, executives, and the chief executive officer ? as people who enable others. As I learned back when I was starting up Student magazine, ?The chief executive officer of a major corporation might only make a couple of decisions a year, but those decisions can affect the lives of millions.? What a terrible way to run a company! / Richard Branson /
Nurturing A Breed Of Intrapreneurs..? / Richard Branson
So, since this seems to be true throughout the business world, clearly it?s time for a major shake-up in the nomenclature of business. What if CEO stood for ?chief enabling officer?? What if that CEO?s primary role were to nurture a breed of intrapreneurs who would grow into tomorrow?s entrepreneurs?
We inadvertently developed this role at Virgin by virtue of the fact that when we?ve chosen to jump into a business about which we have little or no real knowledge, we?ve had to enable a few carefully selected people who do know which end is up.
When Virgin moved into the mobile phone industry we had no experience, so we looked for our rivals? best managers, hired them away, took off their ties and gave them the freedom to set up their own ventures within the Virgin Group. Tom Alexander in theU.K., Dan Schulman in theU.S.and Andrew Black inCanadahave all done this with great success, aggressively taking Virgin companies in new and unexpected directions.
Perhaps the greatest thing about this form of enabled intrapreneurship is that often everyone becomes so immersed in what they?re doing that they feel like they own their companies. They don?t feel like employees working for someone else, they feel much more like ? well, I think the only word to describe it is ?belongers.? ?/ Richard Branson /
The Innovative Era Of Intrapreneurs? / Richard Branson
globalnewspointer.net: In times of economic crisis earning money is not enough to be the given no 1 priority for successful businesses.
Every day business practice proves that our days is the exact time for taking advantage of intrapreneurs based on their vision and creative approaches for moving forward? But, how can we recognize them?
Finally, the simplest way is to create business conditions that make them feel ?belongers? to their business environment. If they feel that they just not ?work? but they ?belong? then, they will unleash their creative power? / Richard Branson /
A multi-use trail system featuring a 5,000-square-foot, fenced-in course will open June 2 in Rockburn Branch Park in Elkridge. The trail, created with mountain bikers and trail runners in mind, is being built through a public-private partnership between the Mid-Atlantic Off Road Enthusiasts (MORE), Howard County Recreation and Parks and the International Mountain Biking Association.
The project, called the Rockburn Skills Park, has attracted grants from the business community. The outdoor gear store REI contributed $10,000 toward building the trails, while Clif Bar provided a $5,000 grant that went toward an already-built, 4,900-square-foot ?pump track,? or series of tight rolling small hills and berms that provide tight-banked turns so bikers can ride the dirt track without ever pedaling.
Other local businesses and organizations ? including Patapsco Bike and Sport, the Elkridge Youth Organization, Bike Doctor Linthicum, Race Pace Cycles, Family Bike Shop, Twenty 20 Cycling and Single Speed Outlaw ? are also helping to fund the $60,000 project.
Melanie Nystrom, a Howard County resident and volunteer who helped coordinate the project, said that the site would likely become an attraction for summer camps and sports tourists. ?Mountain bikers and trail runners will travel in and they will stay in Howard County hotels and support local businesses,? she said. ?We?ve already had interest from the West Virginia University downhill mountain bike team.?
Dave Ferraro, president of MORE, said he considers the Rockburn Skills Park an investment in the environment. ?It?s a fantastic resource to engage kids, families and a diverse constituency in the outdoors,? he said.
A barbeque fundraiser will be held on April 15 in the main pavilion of Rockburn Branch Park. The grand opening of the Rockburn Skills Park will be celebrated at 10 a.m. on June 2.
Cloud computing is the storage of data on remote computer servers and the sharing and transmittal of such information by way of the internet.? Use of the cloud enables both businesses and casual users to maintain as much or as little electronic data as they wish on a third party?s mainframes without the need for or the expense of having to buy and maintain their own hardware systems.
The cloud?s economic benefits are clear.? Still, clouds can be a legal minefield for companies and their counsel. Data breaches, hosting of illegal content and inaccessibility of critical business information are just a few examples of turbulent situations cloud users can face.
Given the risks and potential rewards of the cloud, consider the following guide before entering into a cloud provider contract:
Evaluate Your Business Needs Before Negotiating A Cloud Contract
It is critical to identify your business needs to successfully negotiate an appropriate cloud computing contract.? First, consider whether the contract should be tailored, as opposed to being a standard boilerplate form.?? If you want to have routine, non-sensitive data serviced, it often makes sense to accept a standard, less onerous form of agreement, provided the indemnities and protections are appropriate.?
Alternatively, if your business involves proprietary, confidential or regulated information or data of any sort, you must consider the potential serious legal implications of using cloud storage.? You also will need to ensure that the necessary protections exist before signing on the dotted line.
As a preliminary note, negotiations may be difficult if the bargaining power skews in favor of a cloud service provider.? But in most cases, it does not.? Indeed, there are a myriad of cloud service providers available, affording the potential client greater leverage and bargaining power than the service provider.? This advantage should not be ignored.? As such, be steadfast in negotiations with respect to the storage and protection of your own (or your clients?) business data and personally identifiable information.?
Include Key Provisions In Your Contract To Protect Against Future Risk
Insist on a number of key contract provisions to manage the everyday risks associated with entering confidential business and personal data into the cloud.
As a threshold, you should require the service provider to maintain the utmost confidentiality of your information and be transparent with respect to its security policies and procedures in order to ensure data integrity, availability and confidentiality. In this regard, insist on the same from the service provider?s subcontractors and others with access to the cloud so that you are notified if and when third parties are afforded access to your business and personal data.? In addition, a provision should be included confirming that you are the sole owner of the stored data and identifying the limitations on the scope of the services to be provided under the cloud vendor agreement.
Other key terms to be considered are ones which:
(1) establish protocols dictating how and when the service provider must respond to a security breach incident, including one or more provisions requiring the service provider to immediately inform you of a breach, assist you with the investigation, containment and mitigation of the breach, and allow you to conduct your own investigation;
(2) set forth how and when the service provider must respond to legal process such as complaints, subpoenas or other requests for your clients? data, including requiring that the service provider notify the affected client(s), preferably within hours, of such developments;
(3) afford full transparency with respect to the service provider?s data retention and destruction policies, coupled with a mandate enabling you to create your own data retention and preservation programs (for both data and meta-data);
(4) provide you with an efficient means of authenticating data to ensure that no information has been modified, changed or corrupted; and
?(5) require limitations on the service provider?s right to move data within the cloud from one jurisdiction to another to avoid application of multi-jurisdictional rules and regulations.
Finally, and perhaps just as important as the provisions governing the confidentiality and security of your data, a cloud contract should include an indemnification agreement protecting and holding you harmless if the confidentiality, security or other key provisions are breached by the service provider, its subcontractors or others.?? Such an indemnity agreement ensures that you are defended and compensated for any claims resulting from the provider?s or its agents? acts, errors or omissions, including with respect to confidential data, intellectual property and otherwise.
For example, in the city of Los Angeles?s service contract with Google, Los Angeles is entitled to a minimum of $10,000 if its data is compromised.? The city also has the power to seek unlimited damages if it determines that the breach was egregious. Such monetary damages will help remediate any loss or penalties incurred by the city as a result of the breach.
Ensure Your Provider is Diligent
Identifying the threats facing cloud service providers will not only help you more successfully negotiate the contractual provisions noted above, but also enable you to make an informed decision when selecting a service provider.
Make sure that your provider has strong security procedures and controls in place to thwart daily (and oftentimes real) threats of accidental and malicious attempts to breach weak or insecure interfaces. Specifically, a cloud?s registration process can allow anyone with a credit card (or technical savvy) to instantly gain cloud entry and corrupt it with viruses, Trojan horses and the like. Confirm that the cloud service provider continually enhances and upgrades its initial registration procedures system and proactively monitors the cloud to detect unauthorized and oftentimes dangerous activity.
The provider also should set-up a firewall at each network location and between each security zone within the cloud. Firewall configuration should deny access to non-trustworthy sources, avoid vendor supplied defaults for passwords, restrict access from systems that have direct external connections and those which contain confidential data, and so on. Among other tools, data protection can be provided through the use of encryption keys. ?
? In short, a cloud computing contract must contain well-tailored provisions to protect your business, reputation and assets at all turns.?? Armed with an appropriately structured contract and a vigilant provider, you, as an actual or prospective cloud user, will be able to effectively benefit from the cloud?s infrastructure and maximize its unrivaled and cost-effective level of efficiency.
Cozen O?Connor member and cyberinquirer.com blogger Rick Bortnick advises clients on cyber risks and remediation efforts. Nicole Moody, an associate at the firm, has counseled insurers on technology professional liability policies.
ORNL-led team advances science of carbon accountingPublic release date: 6-Mar-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Ron Walli wallira@ornl.gov 865-576-0226 DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Determining with precision the carbon balance of North America is complicated, but researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have devised a method that considerably advances the science.
In developing their approach, a team led by Daniel Hayes of the Department of Energy's ORNL took advantage of inventory records from the United States, Canada and Mexico that track changes in the amount of carbon in various reservoirs such as plants, soils and wood. From these data, they made estimates of the current rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide sequestration over North America. This allowed researchers to calculate the state of the science in determining North America's carbon balance.
"Our results highlight both consistencies and mismatches among methods for quantifying sources and sinks of CO2 at sub-national scales and across different sectors such as forest, crop and other lands," Hayes said. "Depending on the approach, estimates suggest that the land-based sink offsets approximately 20 to 50 percent of total continental fossil fuel emissions."
The researchers noted that land and ocean sinks which are sequestering carbon about equal amounts of carbon globally are neither permanent nor fixed. Whether they continue to operate is a research question with critical implications. Hayes and colleagues found that much of the current carbon sequestration in North America is associated with the forest sector in the Northwest and Southeast.
"North American land ecosystems are thought to act as a relatively large sink for atmospheric CO2 , but both its current magnitude and response of this sink to future conditions are highly uncertain," Hayes said. The role played by North America is considerable as it may be responsible for up to a third of the combined global land and ocean sink of atmospheric CO2.
That ability to sequester carbon, however, may change given the influences of drought, wildfires and insect outbreaks that lead to carbon losses.
At odds in the carbon balance equation are the two most common assessment approaches based on either top-down or bottom-up perspectives. From the top-down perspective, atmospheric models typically estimate much greater sink strength than bottom-up, or land ecosystem models. The inventory-based estimate is lower still than the average land model.
Each approach has strengths and weaknesses, and they all have substantial uncertainties. Modeling approaches are the primary tool available for making climate projections, but these rely on a large number of complicated and often poorly understood processes. Models are mainly based on physical, chemical and biological principles whereas inventories can track things like the movement of carbon in food and wood products that are influenced by social and economic factors.
Inventory methods like those used for this study have the benefit of extensive and repeated measurements yet there are many processes thought to be important that go unmeasured.
"You can't measure everything everywhere all of the time, especially in the future," Hayes said, "so we need models to fill in the gaps."
Scientists continue research to address knowledge gaps and uncertainties in each of these approaches.
"Ultimately, confidence in our ability to understand and predict the role of the North America carbon cycle in the global climate system will increase as new estimates from these different approaches begin to more closely converge and are combined in more fully integrated monitoring systems," Hayes said.
While there is still a huge range in estimates of CO2 sources and sinks, this paper, published today in the journal Global Change Biology, represents a major step toward reconciliation of the global carbon cycle. This could be especially relevant to policymakers.
"Efforts to establish atmospheric stabilization targets for CO2 emissions need accurate and reliable estimates of the global carbon budget," Hayes said.
###
The paper, titled "Reconciling estimates of the contemporary North American carbon balance among terrestrial biosphere models, atmosphere inversions, and a new approach for estimating net ecosystem exchange from inventory-based data," is available here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02627.x/abstract
Co-authors from ORNL are Yaxing Wei, Mac Post and Robert Cook. Other authors include scientists from Oregon State University; the Canadian Forest Service; the U.S. Geological Survey; Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; the USDA Forest Service; El Colegio de la Frontera Sur, Mexico; Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada; and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
This research was supported by multiple sources, including DOE's Office of Science, a Department of Agriculture grant and NASA's New Investigator Program and the Terrestrial Ecology Program. UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE's Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit http://science.energy.gov/
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
ORNL-led team advances science of carbon accountingPublic release date: 6-Mar-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Ron Walli wallira@ornl.gov 865-576-0226 DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Determining with precision the carbon balance of North America is complicated, but researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have devised a method that considerably advances the science.
In developing their approach, a team led by Daniel Hayes of the Department of Energy's ORNL took advantage of inventory records from the United States, Canada and Mexico that track changes in the amount of carbon in various reservoirs such as plants, soils and wood. From these data, they made estimates of the current rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide sequestration over North America. This allowed researchers to calculate the state of the science in determining North America's carbon balance.
"Our results highlight both consistencies and mismatches among methods for quantifying sources and sinks of CO2 at sub-national scales and across different sectors such as forest, crop and other lands," Hayes said. "Depending on the approach, estimates suggest that the land-based sink offsets approximately 20 to 50 percent of total continental fossil fuel emissions."
The researchers noted that land and ocean sinks which are sequestering carbon about equal amounts of carbon globally are neither permanent nor fixed. Whether they continue to operate is a research question with critical implications. Hayes and colleagues found that much of the current carbon sequestration in North America is associated with the forest sector in the Northwest and Southeast.
"North American land ecosystems are thought to act as a relatively large sink for atmospheric CO2 , but both its current magnitude and response of this sink to future conditions are highly uncertain," Hayes said. The role played by North America is considerable as it may be responsible for up to a third of the combined global land and ocean sink of atmospheric CO2.
That ability to sequester carbon, however, may change given the influences of drought, wildfires and insect outbreaks that lead to carbon losses.
At odds in the carbon balance equation are the two most common assessment approaches based on either top-down or bottom-up perspectives. From the top-down perspective, atmospheric models typically estimate much greater sink strength than bottom-up, or land ecosystem models. The inventory-based estimate is lower still than the average land model.
Each approach has strengths and weaknesses, and they all have substantial uncertainties. Modeling approaches are the primary tool available for making climate projections, but these rely on a large number of complicated and often poorly understood processes. Models are mainly based on physical, chemical and biological principles whereas inventories can track things like the movement of carbon in food and wood products that are influenced by social and economic factors.
Inventory methods like those used for this study have the benefit of extensive and repeated measurements yet there are many processes thought to be important that go unmeasured.
"You can't measure everything everywhere all of the time, especially in the future," Hayes said, "so we need models to fill in the gaps."
Scientists continue research to address knowledge gaps and uncertainties in each of these approaches.
"Ultimately, confidence in our ability to understand and predict the role of the North America carbon cycle in the global climate system will increase as new estimates from these different approaches begin to more closely converge and are combined in more fully integrated monitoring systems," Hayes said.
While there is still a huge range in estimates of CO2 sources and sinks, this paper, published today in the journal Global Change Biology, represents a major step toward reconciliation of the global carbon cycle. This could be especially relevant to policymakers.
"Efforts to establish atmospheric stabilization targets for CO2 emissions need accurate and reliable estimates of the global carbon budget," Hayes said.
###
The paper, titled "Reconciling estimates of the contemporary North American carbon balance among terrestrial biosphere models, atmosphere inversions, and a new approach for estimating net ecosystem exchange from inventory-based data," is available here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02627.x/abstract
Co-authors from ORNL are Yaxing Wei, Mac Post and Robert Cook. Other authors include scientists from Oregon State University; the Canadian Forest Service; the U.S. Geological Survey; Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; the USDA Forest Service; El Colegio de la Frontera Sur, Mexico; Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada; and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
This research was supported by multiple sources, including DOE's Office of Science, a Department of Agriculture grant and NASA's New Investigator Program and the Terrestrial Ecology Program. UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE's Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit http://science.energy.gov/
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Former Saints safety Darren Sharper currently works as an analyst for NFL Network, the TV operation owned and operated by the league.? But Sharper may not have that job much longer, if he continues to openly dispute the findings that the NFL already has made regarding the bounty system that the Saints used from 2009 through 2011.
It started on Friday, when Sharper told NFL.com that the Saints? bounty system didn?t pay players for hits that injured opponents ? even though the announcement of the NFL?s finding plainly states in the second paragraph:? ?The league?s investigation determined that this improper ?Pay for Performance? program included ?bounty? payments to players for inflicting injuries on opposing players that would result in them being removed from a game.?
Sharper was at it again on Monday, telling 97.5 The Fanatic in Philly that Sharper objects to the use of the term ?bounty? because it implies ill intentions. ?Saying that we were trying to maim guys or try to cart a guy off is just totally ridiculous,? Sharper said, which implies that he believes the league?s investigation is ?just totally ridiculous,? since that?s precisely what the league concluded.
Sharper also contradicts the league?s findings regarding the question of whether head coach Sean Payton knew about the bounty system. ?I don?t think Coach Peyton had anything or didn?t know anything about that. Coach Peyton didn?t have any idea what we were doing,? Sharper said.? And then Sharper contradicted himself on this point in a subsequent interview with WWL in Louisiana. ?Was it overseen and controlled by the coaching staff?? Sharper said. ?Yes it was.?
He continues to insist that there was no reward for injuring players, despite the league?s findings.
?This was something that the players came up with and which we wanted to give guys the extra motivation and give guys the extra reward off making big plays in big games,? Sharper told WWL.? ?And those big plays included sacks, interceptions, scoring touchdowns on defense, things that we did throughout my time there that allowed us to win in the fashion that we won.? No way possible did we come into the meeting room before games and say if a guy hurts this player here on their team, their best player, their quarterback, whoever it may be we?re gonna reward that guy for doing that.? At no time was that stated in any of the meetings that I was a part of in the New Orleans Saints organization.?
Again, that flies in the face of the league?s findings.
Sharper also takes issue with the dollars involved. ?Someone also threw the number out there, $50,000,? Sharper said. ?Are you kidding me?? $50,000 on a bounty on someone?s head?? That has to be ridiculous.? First of all, I want to know the guy that?s gonna have that much money they?re gonna pull out their own pocket to pay a guy for just making plays during a game.? That?s just totally nonsense and ridiculous.?
Yes, the stuff that he calls ?totally nonsense and ridiculous? comes from the NFL?s findings.
Perhaps most troubling is Sharper?s desire to publicize the name of the person who told the league what really was happening, after the coaches and players who had been questioned by the league successfully had stonewalled NFL security.
?We had a family in that room and whatever we did within that room should have stayed in that room,? Sharper told 97.5 The Fanatic. His words to WWL could be regarded as a bit more sinister, especially since he believes the entire situation arose from a former employee?s desire to exact revenge on the Saints.
?Someone that was formerly hired and that was formerly working for the Saints and that was relieved of his duties has a vendetta,? Sharper told WWL. ?And they?re trying to get back and is upset about the fact he was let go by the Saints and is trying to make an issue out of something that was in-house and something that we did and was no ill intent in what we did and was just about playing football but now they?re trying to make it into an issue to put a black mark on the Saints organization.?
Sharper possibly is rooting for a vendetta against the person with the vendetta.
?I believe his name will come out,? Sharper said. ?I have the name and I?ve been informed of who we think that possibly is the guy that came out and become the quote-unquote snitch, but it?s not [former director of security Geoffrey] Santini. . . . It?s another guy that I believe will come out at a later date.?
Apart from whether the league is inclined to tell one of its employees to exercise his free speech rights only in a manner that is consistent with what the league has determined to be reality, the NFL would be wise to inform Sharper that the last thing the NFL needs is a Steve Bartman-style incident, with rabid Saints fans threatening action against whoever is viewed as being responsible for killing the Super Bowl buzz more than two years after the fact. The fact that Sharper even knows the name is alarming, and the league should move swiftly to ensure that no one blurts it out or leaks it anonymously to the media.
On Saturday, we explained the potential impact of dishonesty on the effectiveness of an internal investigation. In such contexts, the only thing worse than prevarication (why don?t you look it up instead of playing another round of MW3?) is retaliation. If the league tolerates any effort to ?out? the ?quote-unquote snitch,? the league can forget about ever being able to persuade anyone in the future to do the right thing when rules are being broken in a locker room that would otherwise govern itself by the Golden (Nugget) Rule.
On the same day the NFL inexplicably pulled the plug on a replay of the 2009 NFC title game, the NFL would have been much wiser to instead pull the plug on Darren Sharper?s media tour. And if he won?t fall in line and quit undermining the investigation and its findings, the NFL should pull the plug on Sharper?s employment, too.
[unable to retrieve full-text content]AP - A search for a 4-year-old New Mexico boy led authorities Sunday to a deep, narrow hole in a neighbor's backyard where a police spokeswoman says a detective located the body of a child.
![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_sOw3SvzPTFlP4NH282UnFMPhLTX0q8Th8KYtt7krRIGihJD2RfBovAwn7U62REI7e3udIPdclfl_NOCGoM6CpB4WRriBUn17LBKzjjd_c=s0-d){kind=small}
Public release date: 6-Mar-2012
Share ] 
