On Monday, April 16, during the 11 PM airing of Los Angeles’ CBS 2 News, Daisy appeared in a segment about women and their careers versus men and their careers. If you missed the broadcast, take a look at Daisy’s interview on the subject…you might be surprised at the findings in this feature! Watch Now

Why did 620 people show up in Silicon Valley to see and hear founders and leaders of some of our favorite Internet companies talking with well-respected teachers of mindfulness and neurosciences specialists last month?

The outstanding reason that these technologists and mindfulness leaders were in the same room is that those who work the long hard hours to innovate and produce profitable companies realize that a clear mind — a focused mind — is a creative and innovative mind. And there’s a good dose of philanthropic energy there too since many of those great minds have amassed the wealth with which to change the world and many of those successful people in Silicon Valley actually want to change the world for the better. It turns out that a calm and mindful approach is highly correlated with a compassionate and peace leaning mind. So if the folks in Silicon Valley, the people who have created the very things that have changed the way do business and life are paying attention to this, shouldn’t you too?

How do you clear your mind to increase focus and be more innovative in your thinking? How do you press pause when the work and life you lead is draining you dry? Think the person who snapped at you (or was that you who snapped?), the boss or coworker who just stole your idea and threw you under the bus are aware of their impact? Could a little more kindness in your life make for more effective collaboration and genuine communication?

Research shows that those who take just 15 minutes to sit quietly five times a week for two weeks, using their breathing as an anchor for their concentration, are positively impacted; they feel more peaceful and have a greater sense of equanimity in their daily lives. They are able to handle life’s challenges (and challengers) with more ease. What if we all decided to do that? Can you imagine how much kinder we’d all be to each other, to ourselves, and what innovation we might spark?

If this sparks you, check out a few local places (see below) to learn more about mindfulness practices or check out these books to guide you on your own:

Practices

•  Insight LA
• Against The Stream
• Mindful Awareness Research Center

Books

• Real Happiness by Sharon Salzberg
• The Mindful Brain by Dan Siegel
• Fully Present by Dr. Susan Smalley and Diana Winston
• Lotus Bud Mindfulness Bell – the App Store

Source:  My L.A. Lifestyle
Guest Contributor: Daisy Swan – Photos by Daisy Swan

This is a great piece on Introversion and Extroversion. We can all get along so long as we pay attention to, and appreciate, our differences.

Heard on All Things Considered

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, from NPR News. I’m Melissa Block.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

And I’m Audie Cornish. From Gandhi and Joe DiMaggio to Mother Teresa and Bill Gates, introverts have done a lot of great things in the world. But being quiet, introverted or shy was sometimes looked at as a problem to be overcome.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: If you’re what they call a shy guy, you’re standing on the outside looking in. You might have something to contribute to their conversation, but nobody cares whether you do or not. There’s a barrier, and you don’t know how to begin breaking it down.

CORNISH: In the 1940s and ’50s, the message to most Americans was, don’t be shy. And in the era of reality television, Twitter and relentless self-promotion, it seems that cultural mandate is in overdrive.

A new book tells the story of how things came to be this way, and it’s called “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.” The author is Susan Cain, and she joins us from the NPR studios in New York to talk more about it.

Welcome, Susan.

SUSAN CAIN: Thank you. It’s such a pleasure to be here, Audie.

CORNISH: Well, we’re happy to have you. And to start out – I think we should get this on the record – do you consider yourself an introvert or an extrovert?

CAIN: Oh, I definitely consider myself an introvert, and that was part of the fuel for me to write the book.

CORNISH: And what’s the difference between being an introvert versus being shy? I mean, what’s your definition?

CAIN: So introversion is really about having a preference for lower-stimulation environments – so just a preference for quiet, for less noise, for less action – whereas extroverts really crave more stimulation in order to feel at their best. And what’s important to understand about this is that many people believe that introversion is about being antisocial. And that’s really a misperception because actually, it’s just that introverts are differently social. So they would prefer to have, you know, a glass of wine with a close friend as opposed to going to a loud party full of strangers.

Now shyness, on the other hand, is about a fear of negative social judgment. So you can be introverted without having that particular fear at all, and you can be shy but also be an extrovert.

CORNISH: And in the book, you say that there’s a spectrum. So if some people are listening and they think, well, I, too, like a glass of wine and a party. It’s like we all have these tendencies.

CAIN: Yeah, yeah. That’s an important thing. And, in fact, Carl Jung, the psychologist who first popularized these terms all the way back in the 1920s – even he said there’s no such thing as a pure introvert or a pure extrovert, and he said such a man would be in a lunatic asylum.

CORNISH: That makes me worry because I took your test in the book and I’m like, 90 percent extroverted, basically.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

CORNISH: Now, you mentioned going back into the history. And I want to talk more about that because I was really fascinated by how you showed how this extrovert ideal – you call it – came to be. When did being introverted move from being a character trait to being looked at as a problem?

CAIN: Yeah. What I found is, to some extent, we’ve always had an admiration for extroversion in our culture. But the extrovert ideal really came to play at the turn of the 20th century, when we had the rise of big business. And so suddenly, people were flocking to the cities, and they were needing to prove themselves in big corporations – at job interviews and on sales calls.

And so at that moment in time, we moved from what cultural historians call a culture of character to a culture of personality. So during the culture of character, what was important was the good deeds that you performed when nobody was looking. You know, Abraham Lincoln is the embodiment of the culture of character, and people celebrated him back then for being a man who did not offend by superiority.

But at the turn of the century, when we moved into this culture of personality, suddenly, what was admired was to be magnetic and charismatic. And then at the same time, we suddenly had the rise of movies and movie stars. And movie stars, of course, were the embodiment of what it meant to be a charismatic figure. And so part of people’s fascination with these movie stars was for what they could learn from them, and bring with them to their own jobs.

CORNISH: Now, how does this thinking affect the workplace today?

CAIN: Well, you know, I would say it’s quite a problem in the workplace today because we have a workplace that is increasingly set up for maximum group interaction. More and more of our offices are set up as open-plan offices, where there are no walls and there’s very little privacy. And in fact, the average amount of space per employee actually shrunk from 500 square feet in the 1970s, to 200 square feet today.

And also, introverts are much less often groomed for leadership positions, even though there’s really fascinating research out – recently, from Adam Grant at Wharton – finding that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes. When their employees are more proactive, they’re more likely to let those employees run with their ideas, whereas an extroverted leader might almost unwittingly be more dominant and be putting their own stamp on things, and so those good ideas never come to the fore.

CORNISH: Of course, getting to that theory of like, the loudest ideas aren’t necessarily the best ideas.

CAIN: Right, right.

CORNISH: Except in brainstorming sessions, right? It sounds like some of these team- building things, in a way, don’t stamp out good ideas, but certainly make it hard for those of us who aren’t as loud.

CAIN: Yeah. And none of this is to say that it would be a good thing to get rid of teamwork and to get rid of group work altogether. It’s more just to say that we are at a point in our culture and in our workplace culture, where we’ve gotten too lopsided. And we tend to believe that all creativity and all productivity comes from the group when in fact, there really is a benefit to solitude, and to being able to kind of go off and focus and put your head down.

CORNISH: Susan, I have to admit, as I read the book more and more, I became more and more offended as an extrovert. I felt like, wait a second. I listen to people in meetings. You know, I, like, felt sort of sheepish.

CAIN: Oh, gosh. Well, you know, that’s so not the intention. My criticism in the book is not of extroverts at all, but rather the extrovert ideal. I actually find extroversion to be a really appealing personality style. And this sounds like a funny thing, but many of my best friends truly are extroverts, including my beloved husband.

CORNISH: All my best friends are extroverts. OK. Well, I believe you, and I had a great time talking with you, so thanks so much.

CAIN: Thank you, Audie. I appreciate it.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

CORNISH: That’s Susan Cain, author of “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.” And if all this talk has you thinking, who am I? Introvert, extrovert, ambivert – yes, that’s really a thing. Well, you can take Susan Cain’s quiz at NPR.org.

Source:  Copyright ©2012 National Public Radio®. All Rights Reserved.

Job Seekers, Be Creative and Flexible

In 2012, creativity and adaptability will be key to landing and keeping a job for many workers, as staff levels remain lean and employees are expected to respond to a wide variety of demands, experts say.

Economists don’t expect loads of job growth, but there could be opportunities in areas such as health care, professional services, retail and some manufacturing, says Harry Holzer, a public-policy professor at Georgetown University. Also, continuing churn in the labor market means that even in areas with few new jobs, there will still be openings when workers move around.

Technical knowledge and experience will be required for certain spots. “For professional services you usually need a professional degree. In health you usually need some training,” Mr. Holzer says. “Manufacturing needs some occupational training. Retail is different. It doesn’t require specific occupational training, but it does often require some interpersonal skills.”

In addition to the standard prerequisites, employers will be looking for workers who are able to quickly adapt to new responsibilities as companies respond to changing economic and industry trends. So workers should highlight their creative skills to differentiate themselves, says Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard University.

“Firms have so many job seekers per opening. They are going to want candidates with clear credentials, but also a little extra shine in interactive skills and creativity,” Mr. Katz says. “They are less willing in a weak labor market to take chances.”

Here are other skills experts recommend workers should pick up and enhance.

Technical literacy. It’s important for workers at a variety of levels to be familiar with some of the technical, if mundane, processes that keep organizations running smoothly.

Take the health-care industry. Providers are bringing on more technology when it comes to record keeping and billing.

“A knowledge of electronic data handling is just a really big plus. That goes for receptionists to the doctors who are becoming employees of larger hospital systems,” says Warren Bobrow, president of All About Performance, a Los Angeles-based skills-assessment consultancy.

Workers also need to be good users of social media. There’s a fine line between letting interested parties know about the latest news and bombarding them with too much information. Still, individuals shouldn’t be afraid to use networking sites such as LinkedIn to make employment connections.

Business acumen. As companies remain concerned about demand for their products and services, a wide variety of employees need to think about sales, experts say. Even those outside of marketing should care about revenue, and making sure customers are happy.

Mr. Bobrow has clients in Colorado, an orthopedic practice with more than a dozen doctors, and those doctors don’t become partners until client-satisfaction surveys are reviewed and good results are found.

“They are in a competitive marketplace because so much of their work is based on referrals,” Mr. Bobrow says. “The doctors realize that their revenue depends on all of them bringing in more patients and having patients come back.”

Being savvy about pleasing customers isn’t about spin, says Ben Dattner, a New York-based organizational psychologist and author. Rather, workers need to illustrate the advantages of their products and services to please employers dealing with an ultra-competitive environment.

“Try to get to know your customer, the market and figure out how you can put things together in a package that adds value,” Mr. Dattner says. “Law firms are increasingly recruiting professionals who [bring clients with them]. The actual practice of law is becoming commoditized to some extent, but the ability to bring in customer relationships and be flexible is what companies are increasingly looking for.”

General proficiency. Companies are looking for workers who are flexible and can take on functions in various jobs as market demands change, says Greg Barnett, director of product development at Hogan Assessment Systems, a Tulsa, Okla.-based personality-assessment and consulting firm. That is, companies want workers who are “solid organizational citizens”—quick learners who are compliant, Mr. Barnett says.

“People are being asked to do more,” he says. “There are concerns when applicants are good workers, but not people who are able to learn and change direction and change their performance.”

Dan Ryan, principal at a Nashville, Tenn.-based executive search firm, stresses the importance of project management and communication skills, which also happen to be transferrable. “The ability of people at all levels to clearly communicate is not what it used to be,” he says. People “who can do that very well can differentiate themselves.”

By Ruth Mantell | Source: The Wall Street Journal

What a great opportunity to get your hands dirty in an entrepreneurial venture. During this time of change in our economy this is a life changing opportunity.

Ivy League senior Ethan Carlson recently turned down a job with a global-energy consulting practice and instead pledged to spend two years working for an entrepreneur, perhaps with a focus on renewable energy, in a struggling U.S. city.

“I want to make an impact not only on myself, my career and my finances, but also society around me, and my local community,” the 21-year-old mechanical-engineering major at Yale University says.

The project he plans to join, Venture for America, was founded by Andrew Yang, the former chief executive of Manhattan GMAT, a test-preparation company acquired in 2009 by Kaplan, a Washington Post Co.

Venture for America says it was inspired by Teach for America, which places recent college graduates at schools in low-income communities for two years. This summer its first crop of about 50 “fellows” will be placed at small businesses such as Drop the Chalk, an education-software firm in New Orleans, and Andera Inc., an online-account-opening firm in Providence, R.I.

The companies will pay participants $32,000 to $38,000 a year, plus health benefits. The program includes a five-week program at Brown University that mimics training for consulting and investment banking.

Firms with fewer than 500 employees created about 65% of the nation’s net new jobs, or jobs created minus jobs eliminated, according to the most recent Small Business Administration data.

The goal of the program, Mr. Yang says, is to help start-ups and early-stage businesses get off the ground, and its target is to create 100,000 jobs by 2025. The program has drawn commitments to donate services and about $500,000 in cash, he says.

Mr. Yang believes there is a disconnect between small businesses seeking to hire successful college graduates capable of wearing many hats, and graduates, like Mr. Carlson, who want to learn about the basics of starting a new company.

Fifty-four percent of the nation’s 18-to-34-year-olds either want to start a business or have already started one, according to a survey by the Young Invincibles, a group focusing on young entrepreneurship, that was funded by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a research group.

Some of the struggling cities selected by the program have burgeoning start-up scenes but still need talent. Cincinnati, for instance, has a fairly vibrant consumer marketing and branding industry, partly because Procter & Gamble Co. and Kroger Co. are based there. At Andera, the participating fellow will be expected to work as part of a team to conceptualize a new product and to create a business case for it, says Charlie Kroll, the company’s founder and chief executive officer.

The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, a nonprofit strategy and research organization based in Boston, Mass., estimates that 460,000 U.S. businesses are located in inner cities.

Jen Medbery, founder and CEO of Drop the Chalk, says the program will serve as a “professional recruiting firm, picking the best and brightest from the top colleges and making it affordable for me to hire and mentor them.”

By Emily Glazer | Source: The Wall Street Journal

There is increasingly obvious evidence that slowing down to a quiet stop on a regular basis increases well being and even happiness. Do we really have to live life with such stress? I don’t think so. We just need to prioritize a little quiet into our days to realize this. Try it.

ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign — was stillness.

A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? “I never read any magazines or watch TV,” he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”

Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.

Has it really come to this?

In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen.

Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable (for up to eight hours) the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel (of all companies) experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. (The average office worker today, researchers have found, enjoys no more than three minutes at a time at his or her desk without interruption.) During this period the workers were not allowed to use the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. A majority of Intel’s trial group recommended that the policy be extended to others.

THE average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book “The Shallows,” in part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a TV screen, often simultaneously, is also steadily increasing).

The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow, I heard myself tell the marketers in Singapore, will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once.

The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content — and speedier means could make up for unimproved ends — Henry David Thoreau reminded us that “the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.” Even half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.” Thomas Merton struck a chord with millions, by not just noting that “Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,” but by also acting on it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister.

Yet few of those voices can be heard these days, precisely because “breaking news” is coming through (perpetually) on CNN and Debbie is just posting images of her summer vacation and the phone is ringing. We barely have enough time to see how little time we have (most Web pages, researchers find, are visited for 10 seconds or less). And the more that floods in on us (the Kardashians, Obamacare, “Dancing with the Stars”), the less of ourselves we have to give to every snippet. All we notice is that the distinctions that used to guide and steady us — between Sunday and Monday, public and private, here and there — are gone.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines.

So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.

MAYBE that’s why more and more people I know, even if they have no religious commitment, seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation, or tai chi; these aren’t New Age fads so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two journalist friends of mine observe an “Internet sabbath” every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation. Finding myself at breakfast with a group of lawyers in Oxford four months ago, I noticed that all their talk was of sailing — or riding or bridge: anything that would allow them to get out of radio contact for a few hours.

Other friends try to go on long walks every Sunday, or to “forget” their cellphones at home. A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr. Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.” More than that, empathy, as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are “inherently slow.” The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for.

In my own case, I turn to eccentric and often extreme measures to try to keep my sanity and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the time). I’ve yet to use a cellphone and I’ve never Tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day’s writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event.

None of this is a matter of principle or asceticism; it’s just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”

It’s vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world, and to know what’s going on; I took pains this past year to make separate trips to Jerusalem and Hyderabad and Oman and St. Petersburg, to rural Arkansas and Thailand and the stricken nuclear plant in Fukushima and Dubai. But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.

For more than 20 years, therefore, I’ve been going several times a year — often for no longer than three days — to a Benedictine hermitage, 40 minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don’t attend services when I’m there, and I’ve never meditated, there or anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it’s only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and friends that I’ll have anything useful to bring to them. The last time I was in the hermitage, three months ago, I happened to pass, on the monastery road, a youngish-looking man with a 3-year-old around his shoulders.

“You’re Pico, aren’t you?” the man said, and introduced himself as Larry; we’d met, I gathered, 19 years before, when he’d been living in the cloister as an assistant to one of the monks.

“What are you doing now?” I asked.

“I work for MTV. Down in L.A.”

We smiled. No words were necessary.

“I try to bring my kids here as often as I can,” he went on, as he looked out at the great blue expanse of the Pacific on one side of us, the high, brown hills of the Central Coast on the other. “My oldest son” — he pointed at a 7-year-old running along the deserted, radiant mountain road in front of his mother — “this is his third time.”

The child of tomorrow, I realized, may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what’s new, but what’s essential.

By Pico Iyer | Source: The New York Times

Can’t find a job in LA? You might to look in another country…

Making a Play for Video Gamers

It took Abdulrahman al-Zanki, then 14, a few weeks to develop his first game, Yellow Taxi, and upload it to Apple iTunes in 2010, learning from written instructions between school hours and homework. Since then, the Kuwaiti teenager has created 22 more iPhone games in less than two years, including the highly popular Doodle Destroy.

“I really love making iPhone games, but I can’t wait to make some real video games for the Xbox, PlayStation 3 or Wii,” Abdulrahman said during an interview last month. “What I really liked about Doodle Destroy was that it had a lot of downloads. I hope that whenever I create a game, it reaches the top charts.”

Investors and game-making companies are counting on the talent and passion of young people like Abdulrahman to help build a vibrant Arab gaming industry and conquer a share of the potentially lucrative market.

Digital games sales in the Middle East and Africa in 2011 accounted for an estimated $900 million out of the $24 billion global market: but that figure is set to rise at a compound annual growth rate of 29 percent to reach $3.2 billion in 2016, compared with global growth of 17 percent for the same period, according to the research firm Ovum, based in London.

From online games to more complex products played on consoles, game developers are benefiting from the spread of smartphones and other mobile phones, broader use of the Internet and a high per capita spending rate in the Gulf region, where oil wealth allows many young people to indulge in their passions. According to a 2011 survey conducted by the Jordan-based consulting firm Arab Advisors Group, 65 percent of Internet users in Saudi Arabia play games online.

The Abu Dhabi government’s media and entertainment program, called twofour54 after the nation’s coordinates, made its first gaming investment last year, channeling $2.5 million to Tahadi Games, a unit of the Jabbar Internet group based in Dubai, and Jawaker, a Jordanian company.

Twofour54 is planning to invest in more regional game-developers next year, said Wayne Borg, the organization’s deputy chief executive.

With help from the French game developer Ubisoft, twofour54 plans to open an academy for game developers in Abu Dhabi in March. About 20 students are expected to be enrolled. The initial enrollment will be about 20 students.

With some financial help from twofour54, Ubisoft is planning to open a production studio in Abu Dhabi this year and hopes to hire 100 employees during the next three to five years.

“If a government or any authority wants to develop such an industry they have to invest,” said Yannick Theler, who will be the managing director of the Abu Dhabi office for Ubisoft. “It is costly to open a studio and it takes time to set up a good team. Without any help from the government, it is difficult to take some risk.”

The Abu Dhabi venture, expected to open in March or April, is the second for Ubisoft in the region. The company also has an academy in Casablanca. The Abu Dhabi office will initially focus on creating content that could be marketed worldwide, but could gradually move toward designing games with a regional flavor, Mr. Theler said. The aim is to develop a small-scale game in at most two years, he added.

Twofour54 is now talking to other international firms to build a richer game development environment.

“It is important when international and regional companies do come here, they come here for the right commercial reasons,” Mr. Borg of twofour54 said. “We focus our investment where we can contribute to stimulating that ecosystem. It is these small emerging businesses that drive creativity, innovation and where jobs are generated.”

In Jordan, a center for information technology startups in the Middle East, gaming firms have joined forces under the government-backed Jordan Gaming Task Force, or the J.G.T.F., to help propel the country’s production regionally and internationally.

But efforts to build a pan-Arab industry remain fragmented.

“The major problem in the Arab world is the lack of support from government and the private sector,” said Nour Khrais, J.G.T.F. chairman and general manager of the gaming firm Maysalward. “We, as Jordan or U.A.E., can’t do it alone. If we want to create an industry, we have to work together as companies to be able to produce games that can shine in this crowded industry.”

While cross-country collaboration remains rare, companies from the region and abroad are weaving closer ties. Timeline Interactive, an Egyptian company, developed Cellfactor: Psychokinetic Wars, which was published by Ubisoft, and the Quirkat, based in the United Arab Emirates, is developing games for Sony’s PlayStation. The desire to profit from the region’s widespread gaming community inspired Sony in 2010 to release its first fully localized Arabic title, Start the Party Arabic, and the company is planning to create more such titles.

“The Middle East still has a lot of growth potential and especially in the software side of the business, and that’s what we expect to focus on in the next 18 months,” said Robert Fisser, Sony Computer Entertainment’s general manager for the Middle East, Africa, Turkey and India.

“If you just look at the global Arab population, there is no reason why we wouldn’t be able to sell locally developed games in other countries outside the Middle East,” Mr. Fisser said. “I think it just needs coordination and support to bringing it all together, or getting one really good local title that is a hit with the local gamers.”

The market is not without challenges. The local gaming community is demanding — unlikely to settle for poor quality or for products simply because they come from nearby. Tailoring a game to fit the cultural diversity of 22 Arab countries while also carrying global appeal could also be a sticking point.

“Language is our common denominator,” the Quirkat chief executive, Mahmoud Khasawneh, said. “Other than that, religious and political limits are not the same. The biggest market is Saudi Arabia, but it is hard to tailor a game for a specific environment, when you want to have appeal to the international market.”

“It is not magic, it is a money guzzling business,” Mr. Khasawneh added. “We need money to create money and it is going to take time for Arabs to invest in their own capabilities in games development.”

By Dania Saadi | Source: The New York Times

Daisy Swan – Career Coach
Guest Contributor for My L.A. Lifestyle

They’re inevitable, right? The five or six holiday functions that we feel we must attend, like it or not. Well this holiday season, why not look at those holiday happenings in a different light? Use them to your advantage, to further your business or your career. Look at these functions not only as networking opportunities, but as a way to focus in on what you might want to be doing – or doing differently – in the New Year.

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We all need to be developing our talents, expanding our repertoire and acceptance that things won’t be going back to the old ‘normal’. Look for the opportunity and build toward new horizons.

It’s the Economy: The Dwindling Power of a College Degree

The 2012 presidential election can be seen as offering a choice between two visions of how to return us to this country’s golden age — from roughly 1945 to around 1973 — when working life was most secure for many Americans, particularly white, middle-class men. President Obama said his jobs plan was for people who believed “if you worked hard and played by the rules, you would be rewarded.” Mitt Romney explained his goal was to restore hope for “folks who grew up believing that if they played by the rules . . . they would have the chance to build a good life.” But these days, many workers have lost a near guarantee on a decent wage and benefits — and their careers are likely to have much more volatility (great years; bad years; confusing, mediocre years) than their parents’ ever did. So when did the rules change?

It has been hard to keep track. Over the past four decades, we have experienced the oil embargo, Carter-era malaise and a few recessions. Mixed in were the thrills of the late 1990s and mid-aughts, when it seemed as if you were a sap if you weren’t getting rich or at least trying. But these dramas prevented many of us from realizing that the economic logic was changing fundamentally. Starting in the 1970s, labor was upended by a lot more than just formal government work rules. Increased global trade devastated workers in many industries, especially textiles, apparel, toys, furniture and electronics assembly. Computers and other technological innovations had an arguably greater impact. While factories continue to make more stuff in the United States than ever before, employment in them has collapsed.

Computers have hurt workers outside factories too. Picture the advertising agency in “Mad Men,” and think about the abundance of people who were hired to do jobs that are now handled electronically by small machines. Countless secretaries were replaced by word processing, voice mail, e-mail and scheduling software; accounting staff by Excel; people in the art department by desktop design programs. This is also true of trades like plumbing and carpentry, in which new technologies replaced a bunch of people who most likely stood around helping measure things and making sure everything worked correctly.

As a result, the people whose jobs remained valuable in that “Mad Men” office were then freed up to do more valuable things. A talented art director could produce more work more quickly with InDesign. A bright accountant could spend more time thinking of new ways to make and save money, rather than spending endless hours punching numbers into an adding machine. Global trade works much the same way. It’s horrible news for a textile factory worker in North Carolina, but it may be great for a fashion designer in New York.

A general guideline these days is that people are rewarded when they can do things that take trained judgment and skill — things, in other words, that can’t be done by computers or lower-wage workers in other countries. Money now flows around the world so quickly, and technology changes so fast, that people who thought they were in high demand find themselves uprooted. Many newspaper reporters have learned that their work was subsidized, in part, by classified ads and now can’t survive the rise of Craigslist; computer programmers have found out that some smart young guys in India will do their jobs for much less. Meanwhile, China lends so much money to the United States that mortgage brokers and bond traders can become richer than they ever imagined for a few years and then, just as quickly, become broke and unemployed.

One of the greatest changes is that a college degree is no longer the guarantor of a middle-class existence. Until the early 1970s, less than 11 percent of the adult population graduated from college, and most of them could get a decent job. Today nearly a third have college degrees, and a higher percentage of them graduated from nonelite schools. A bachelor’s degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability. To get a good job, you have to have some special skill — charm, by the way, counts — that employers value. But there’s also a pretty good chance that by some point in the next few years, your boss will find that some new technology or some worker overseas can replace you.

Though it’s no guarantee, a B.A. or some kind of technical training is at least a prerequisite for a decent salary. It’s hard to see any great future for high-school dropouts or high-school graduates with no technical skills. They most often get jobs that require little judgment and minimal training, like stocking shelves, cooking burgers and cleaning offices. Employers generally see these unskilled workers as commodities — one is as good as any other — and thus each worker has very little bargaining power, especially now that unions are weaker. There are about 40 million of these low-skilled people in our work force. They’re vying for jobs that are likely to earn near the minimum wage with few or no benefits, and they have a high chance of being laid off many times in a career.

Global trade and technology are significant trends, but they’re not laws and policies. The actual rules have also changed notably since the 1970s. Back then, there were all sorts of stabilizers that pushed working-class wages up and kept rich people’s wages lower. The minimum wage, at its pre-1970s peak, was almost 50 percent higher than it is now (inflation adjusted, naturally). Unions were stronger and had more government support. The United States taxed the rich much higher relative to the working class. (The top bracket was taxed at 70 percent in 1978; now it’s 35 percent.) It’s hard to imagine, but regulations largely limited the profitability of banks and kept bankers’ financial compensation low.

The new rules, combined with the other major changes, have effectively removed both the floor and the ceiling. It’s easier for some to make a lot more money and for others to fall much further behind. That has meant a huge increase in inequality. The top 1 percent of families now makes 26 times the average of the other 99 percent (the ratio was 11 to 1 in 1979). The top 0.1 percent makes 130 times the bottom 99 (up from a 38-to-1 ratio 40 years ago). And the inequality is not just between classes. The average wages of the average American have stayed largely flat for decades, but those averages hide a lot of volatility, as more people find themselves at the extremes of wealth or poverty. A successful plumber who has mastered all the new water-flow sensor technology and pipe-fitting innovations (and is probably in a union) can make more than $100,000 a year, while other plumbers, who just know the basics, could make less than $20,000.

The increasingly vicious battle between left and right is, at the most basic level, a dispute over how to respond to these new rules. Republicans largely claim that the new rules will make the country richer and, in the long run, will be beneficial to everyone willing to put in the hard work. Few Democrats call for a return to record high taxes and trade barriers — after all, the free flow of cheap goods has helped many, particularly the poor. But many do want a return to the spirit of the old rules, when the government sought to make life more equal, more stable and, for some, less rewarding. The rest of us, meanwhile, should go to school, learn some skills and prepare for a rocky road.

By Adam Davidson | Source: The New York Times

Good News About Hiring Trends for 2012!
Time to Re-Energize Your Job Search Activities

Large employers plan to increase their hiring of college graduates finishing their degrees in the 2011-12 academic year. The trend continues an uptick that began last year after hiring declined during the recession and the early part of the recovery, according to a new survey by Michigan State University’s Collegiate Employment Research Institute.

Big firms – those with more than 4,000 workers – plan to hire 6% more graduates than last year.

Smaller companies, with fewer than 500 employees, are hiring, but cautiously. Those firms said they plan to add an average of 11 workers each, essentially the same as last year, the study reported.

The weak spot in the hiring outlook for new grads is mid-sized organizations with 501 to 4,000 employees, especially state and local government agencies. Hiring for recent grads will decline by 3% for those employers.

“We’ve had a problem in the mid-sized group for quite a while,” said Phil Gardner, director of research at CERI and the study’s author. When the economic crisis hit in 2008 and 2009, he said, the vulnerability in the segment came from “second- and third-tier suppliers, consulting companies, firms that rely on big companies for contracts,” while local government hiring remained strong thanks to stimulus funds from Washington.

But the trend has reversed in the last year as stimulus dollars dried up. Private companies are starting to bounce back, but with parks closing, school districts’ budgets frozen and public agencies making cuts across the board, this once-robust source of jobs for young people is contracting.

For instance, the American Association of School Administrators, a national research and advocacy group, is projecting cuts of 227,000 local education positions for the 2011-12 school year, a figure that includes teaching jobs as well as entry-level posts such as classroom support. Due to seniority rules in some districts, those positions that are getting filled will go to experienced professionals whose previous jobs were eliminated instead of to “freshly minted teachers and recent graduates,” Noelle Ellerson, assistant director for public policy and advocacy at the American Association of School Administrators, said via email.

Meanwhile, salaries across the board for new grads aren’t budging much, with 77% of MSU survey respondents saying they’re holding their starting offers steady. There may be good news on the horizon, though: a few employers are once again offering signing bonuses after four years of eschewing the practice.

While only 5% of employers said they’ll include signing bonuses with their offers, Mr. Gardner views this as the leading edge of a trend and an indicator that wages will likely go up soon. “Once bonuses pick up, it’ll translate into salaries,” particularly in hot fields like engineering and computer science, he said.

By Lauren Weber| Source: The Wall Street Journal