They?raised $11.45 million, acquired a company called Sensobi, and were themselves?acquired by Skype?for a price that was likely well north of $43 million. There may not be a wilder tale of a Disrupt success (though plenty of startups would beg to differ), which is why we?ve chosen GroupMe to kick off a series I?m doing on ?Disrupt Startups: Where They Are Now.?oscar nominations rough riders joy division dodd frank norco rand paul detained nbc news
This Mother's Day, Matt Damon and Jodie Foster would like to challenge everyone to honor mothers everywhere by helping Water.org end the water crisis around the world.
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American Idol is just two weeks away from crowning a new winner, but to get to that pivotal final round, the reality show had to eliminate one of the final four potential Idols on Thursday night.
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FILE - This undated file photo provided by the Pacific Investment Management Co., shows Bill Gross, manager of the PIMCO Total Return Fund. The struggling countries of Europe have followed a diet of deep spending cuts for two years in hopes of averting financial catastrophe and persuading bond investors to buy their debt. Gross says that countries can?t simply cut their way out of the debt crisis. That?s bound to backfire, he says. (AP Photo/Pacific Investment Management Co., File)
FILE - This undated file photo provided by the Pacific Investment Management Co., shows Bill Gross, manager of the PIMCO Total Return Fund. The struggling countries of Europe have followed a diet of deep spending cuts for two years in hopes of averting financial catastrophe and persuading bond investors to buy their debt. Gross says that countries can?t simply cut their way out of the debt crisis. That?s bound to backfire, he says. (AP Photo/Pacific Investment Management Co., File)
NEW YORK (AP) ? The struggling countries of Europe have cut spending for two years in hopes of averting financial catastrophe and persuading bond investors to buy their debt.
But the world's most influential bond investor thinks it won't work.
Bill Gross, manager of Pimco's $252 billion Total Return Fund, the largest mutual fund, says that countries can't simply cut their way out of the debt crisis. That's bound to backfire, he says.
The countries that use the euro reduced their budget deficits last year, but their economies shrank, too. As a result, their debt increased as a share of their annual economic output. Eight of the 17 euro countries are in recession.
Meanwhile, unemployment in the so-called eurozone is almost 11 percent and rising. Outrage over spending cuts led voters last weekend to oust leaders in Greece and France who had promoted cuts as a way out of the crisis.
Some questions and answers with the man sometimes called the bond king:
Q: What do you make of the backlash in Europe against deep spending cuts? They were supposed to lure investors like you into buying government bonds from Greece, Portugal, Spain and the like. It doesn't seem to be working.
A: We do look at the debt levels. It matters. But a bond investor has to look at economic growth, too. If a country can't grow its way out of its predicament, we won't go there. That's why we've stayed out of Europe for the most part.
Q: So the so-called austerity approach ? tightening government budgets through spending cuts and tax increases ? isn't enough for you. A country can't keep cutting spending and hope that prosperity eventually shows up?
A: No, that doesn't work. Eliminating a budget deficit won't produce growth. It really requires a delicate combination of growth and budget discipline over the longer term. Policymakers have it tough.
Q: Paul Krugman, the economist and columnist for The New York Times, has been saying this for years. It's the lesson of the Great Depression: Tightening budgets in the face of an economic slump only makes the slump worse.
A: I'm not a big Krugman advocate. But I agree that you don't cut everything and hope the private markets reward you for it. It has to be a balance. What Europe really needs is to get the private market back in there. They're trying to convince the Pimcos of the world to return (by having the European Central Bank lend to banks), but all the efforts so far use public money. The global marketplace is privately funded. And if the private markets can't be convinced, this crisis is going to be with us for a very long time.
Q: What would it take to convince you to buy bonds from one of the troubled countries?
A: It takes economic growth, honestly. And it also takes policies that last longer than one or two months. We haven't avoided Europe, entirely. We invest in Germany and France. But we avoid the bad boys and girls because there doesn't appear to be a growth solution to these countries' problems.
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Tiger Woods hits from the sand trap on the 11th hole during a practice round for The Players Championship golf tournament Wednesday, May 9, 2012, at Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara)
Tiger Woods hits from the sand trap on the 11th hole during a practice round for The Players Championship golf tournament Wednesday, May 9, 2012, at Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara)
Rickie Folwer, right, signs autographs after completing a practice round for The Players Championship golf tournament Wednesday, May 9, 2012, at Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara)
Tiger Woods, right, laughs as his caddie Joe LaCava, left, prepares to take part in the caddie challenge on the 17th hole during a practice round for The Players Championship golf tournament Wednesday, May 9, 2012, at Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. The caddies challenge raises money for wounded military veterans. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara)
PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. (AP) ? Golf's world ranking has been more like a game of musical chairs with the most turnover at the top in the 26-year history of the ranking. Rory McIlroy and Luke Donald would like the music to stop playing for good sometime this year, the sooner the better. And both want the same outcome.
"Hopefully," Donald said Wednesday, raising his hand, "it will be me."
McIlroy said the same last week at Quail Hollow, where his playoff loss at the Wells Fargo Championship was enough for him to return to No. 1 for the third time this year.
Donald has a chance to take it back from him this week at The Players Championship, which offers the most world ranking points of any tournament besides the majors. They already have taken turns at the top six times in the last 10 weeks. The last time the No. 1 ranking was even remotely this volatile was in 1997, when it changed seven times in 13 weeks among Greg Norman, Tiger Woods, Tom Lehman and Ernie Els.
The Players Championship is a rare occasion for them to get together. Already four months into the season, McIlroy and Donald have only competed in the same tournament four times: the Abu Dhabi Championship, two World Golf Championships and the Masters.
"I think the last couple of months have not been as exciting because Rory and I really haven't been playing in the same events," Donald said. "I think that will change a little bit, and hopefully there will be some situations coming up in the next few months where we'll be playing in the same tournament and both having a chance to win the tournament."
As for a clear No. 1, Donald said that can only happen by winning a major or multiple tournaments ? along with the other players not playing well.
The ranking shuffle speaks to a broader issue in golf. No one ever talked about the world ranking because there was no debate about No. 1.
There was no parity in golf. There was Tiger Woods.
In the 18 months since Woods abandoned his post atop the world ranking, four players have been No. 1: McIlroy, Donald, Lee Westwood and Martin Kaymer. In the 30 months since injuries and the scandal in his personal life reduced Woods to an ordinary player, no one has won more than three times in a season on the PGA Tour. That used to be considered a slump for Woods.
"Do I think it's good for the game?" Woods said of the current state of golf. "I liked it when I was up there. That's just me."
The edge going into The Players Championship belongs to McIlroy, the U.S. Open champion, based on consistency. Not only did he win the Honda Classic in early March to reach No. 1 for the first time, he has finished out of the top five only once this year. That was at the Masters, where he was one shot behind going into the weekend, closed with 77-76 and tied for 40th.
Donald, who got off to a slow start this year, has finished out of top 30 in five of his eight tournaments. He showed how determined he is to stay in the picture, though, by winning the Transitions Championship and rallying on the weekend to finish third in New Orleans.
Golf now heads into a time of the year where there will be ample opportunity for someone to establish himself as the clear No. 1, with The Players Championship, Memorial, Europe's flagship event at Wentworth, followed by three majors and a World Golf Championship. If that's not enough, Donald, McIlroy and Westwood ? who at No. 3 also has a slim chance to get to No. 1 again this week at Sawgrass ? are PGA Tour members and eligible for the FedEx Cup playoffs, which feature four strong fields at the end of the summer.
It all starts to unfold Thursday on a course that fittingly favors no one. The past winners on the Stadium Course at the TPC Sawgrass range from power (Woods, Norman, Phil Mickelson, David Duval) to precision (Tim Clark, Fred Funk, Hal Sutton).
McIlroy and Westwood skipped last year when they belonged to the same management company and were not PGA Tour members.
"It wasn't one of my brightest moments," McIlroy said. "I'm glad to be back."
The Players Championship typically boasts the deepest and strongest field in golf, though it gets just as much notoriety from the course on which it's played, particularly that island green on the par-3 17th that makes for great TV and becomes a smaller target depending on what's at stake.
Missing from the field is Masters champion Bubba Watson, who has pulled out of the last two tournaments so he can bond with the baby boy he and his wife in late March; Dustin Johnson, still recovering from a back injury; and 2011 Masters champion Charl Schwartzel.
Mickelson, a past champion at Sawgrass, is fresh off his induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame. Woods is coming off only the eighth missed cut of his career at Quail Hollow. Even in the best of times, Woods struggled on this golf course. He won in 2001, was the runner-up in 2000, but never seriously contended any of the other 12 times at The Players Championship.
"I've done really well or I haven't," Woods said. "Either I've been right there in contention with a chance or I haven't."
He was speaking of The Players Championship, though he just as easily could have been talking about his season. His win at Bay Hill in March at least got him back into the top 10 in the world, though even if he were to win his next two tournaments, he could not get to No. 1.
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Research in Motion said the U.S. Department of Defense approved six models of the company's BlackBerry 7 smartphones for use on its networks.
The approval means RIM's single largest customer can upgrade to the Canadian smartphone maker's latest devices.
RIM's BlackBerry phones have long been used by army and other defense department personnel, but each new version of the device must be tested before it can be approved for use in sensitive roles where a data breach could endanger national security.
Last year, the U.S. Army introduced new applications and capabilities, such as Near Field Communications and voice activated universal search, for its BlackBerry users, RIM said in a statement.
The BlackBerry ? derided as outdated and outpaced in a field of touch-based devices ? is used by U.S. President Barack Obama, who owns a modified and tightly controlled model of the smartphone.
(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2012. Check for restrictions at: http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful
This review is from: HBR?s 10 Must Reads on Change Management (including featured article ?Leading Change,? by John P. Kotter) (Paperback)
This volume is one of several in a new series of anthologies of articles that initially appeared in the Harvard Business Review, in this instance from 1960 until 2006. Remarkably, none seems dated; on the contrary, if anything, all seem more relevant now than ever before as their authors discuss what are (literally) essential dimensions of organizational and/or individual change.
More specifically, why transformation efforts fail (John P. Kotter), how to achieve change through persuasion (David A. Garvin and Michael A. Roberto), what can be learned from an interview of Samuel J. Palmisano about leading change when business is good, why radical change can be ?the quiet way? (Barbara E. Meyerson), what ?tipping point leadership is and does? (W. Chan Kim and Ren?e Mauborgne), what a survival guide for leaders should provide (Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky), the real reason people won?t change (Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey), how to crack ?the code of change? (Michael Berr and Nitin Nohria), the hard side of change management (Harold L. Sirkin, Perry Keenan, and Alan Jackson), and why change programs don?t produce change (Michael Beer, Russell A. Eisenstat, and Bert Spector).
Each article includes two invaluable reader-friendly devices, ?Idea in Brief? and ?Idea in Practice? sections, that facilitate, indeed expedite review of key points. Some articles also include brief commentaries on even more specific subjects such as ?Dysfunctional Routines? (Pages 238-29), ?Tempered Radicals as Everyday Leaders? (Page 64), ?Adaptive Versus Technical Change: Whose Problem Is It?? (Paged 105), ?Getting Groups to Change? (Pages 124-125), ?Big Assumptions: How Our Perceptions Shape Our Reality? (Pages 132-133), ?Calculating DICE [duration, integrity, commitment, and effort] Scores? (Pages 166-168) and ?Tracking Corporate Change? (Pages 183-184).
These ten articles do not ? because they obviously cannot ? explain everything that one knows to know and understand about formulating and then executing an effective strategy. However, I do not know of another single source at this price (currently $14.41 from Amazon) that provides more and better information, insights, and advice that will help leaders to achieve success in the business dimensions explained so well by the authors of the articles in this volume.
This volume is one of several in a new series of anthologies of articles that initially appeared in the Harvard Business Review, in this instance from 1960 until 2006. Remarkably, none seems dated; on the contrary, if anything, all seem more relevant now than ever before as their authors discuss what are (literally) essential dimensions of organizational and/or individual change.
More specifically, why transformation efforts fail (John P. Kotter), how to achieve change through persuasion (David A. Garvin and Michael A. Roberto), what can be learned from an interview of Samuel J. Palmisano about leading change when business is good, why radical change can be ?the quiet way? (Barbara E. Meyerson), what ?tipping point leadership is and does? (W. Chan Kim and Ren?e Mauborgne), what a survival guide for leaders should provide (Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky), the real reason people won?t change (Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey), how to crack ?the code of change? (Michael Berr and Nitin Nohria), the hard side of change management (Harold L. Sirkin, Perry Keenan, and Alan Jackson), and why change programs don?t produce change (Michael Beer, Russell A. Eisenstat, and Bert Spector).
These ten articles do not ? because they obviously cannot ? explain everything that one knows to know and understand about formulating and then executing an effective strategy. However, I do not know of another single source at this price (currently $14.41 from Amazon) that provides more and better information, insights, and advice that will help leaders to achieve success in the business dimensions explained so well by the authors of the articles in this volume.
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