Quantcast
Channel: Features
Viewing all 61683 articles
Browse latest View live

Meet the private army controlled by sacked Ukrainian billionaire Igor Kolomoisky

$
0
0

Ilovaysk Ukraine fighting

Billionaire banking tycoon Igor Kolomoisky was appointed governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, a region in the east of the country that includes Ukraine's third-largest city, in March last year. He had one job: prevent the territory from falling into the hands of pro-Moscow rebels.

Although he was a close ally of President Petro Poroshenko's new government in Kiev, neither had the financial nor military clout to achieve that aim. So Kolomoisky decided to build his own private army of volunteers, equipped with heavy weaponry. He paid for all of this from out of his own pocket.

The recruits came from Ukraine and Europe. There are even a couple of Americans. Estimates suggest Kolomoisky could call on over 20,000 troops and reserves. His Dnipro Battalion, also known as Dnipro-1, includes around 2,000 heavily armed fighters. The unit is reported to have cost the banking billionaire $10 million to set up. They helped play a key role in halting the advance of the Moscow-backed rebels from their strongholds in the neighbouring Donetsk and Luhansk.

However, there are doubts about where the troops' ultimate loyalties lie — to the government in Ukraine or to their regional paymaster. Last week, armed men in masks stormed the headquarters of state-owned oil company UkrTransNafta in the Ukrainian capital Kiev, following the sacking of its director Oleksander Lazorko, a key ally of Kolomoisky.

On Tuesday, Poroshenko fired Kolomoisky and now this private could become a major problem for the Ukrainian authorities.

Igor Kolomoisky, a prominent Ukrainian businessman and founder of the country's largest commercial bank Privat Bank, took office in Dnipropetrovsk in March 2014.



Dnipropetrovsk became the front line in the battle between pro-Russian separatists in the east and Ukraine government forces.



He quickly set about recruiting and training volunteer "self-defence" forces that would become the Dnipro Battalion as well as a number of smaller groups that manned checkpoints.



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Meet the richest Brazilian in the world, who partnered with Warren Buffett to merge Heinz and Kraft

$
0
0

jorge paulo lemann

Kraft and Heinz are coming together in a massive merger that will create the fifth-largest food company in the world. Two investment firms are behind it, Berkshire Hathaway and 3G Capital.

Of course you know Berkshire is helmed by legendary investor Warren Buffett, but you may be less familiar with 3G. It is helmed by the richest Brazilian in the world, Jorge Lemann.

Or as Buffett likes to call him, "Georgie Paolo."

Lemann has gone from journalist to national tennis champion to banker and now billionaire investor.

"Money is simply a way of measuring if the business is going well or not, but money in and of itself doesn't fascinate me," Lemann said in January 2008, according to an interview published in HSM Management magazine. He declined to comment for this story.

Shows you that he's just in it for the love of the game.

Lemann was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1939. His father was a Swiss businessman who immigrated to Brazil in the 1920s.



He left Brazil to attend Harvard, earning his bachelor's degree in economics in 1961. Lemann still has a great relationship with Harvard, helping Brazilian students study there and setting up scholarships.



After Harvard, Lemann's life was a mixed bag. He trained at Credit Suisse for a while and worked as a journalist at Brazil's third-oldest paper, Jornal do Brasil.



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

An entire private island in South Florida is on the market for $24.5 million

$
0
0

Little Bokeelia Island_31

An island paradise off the coast of Florida is up for sale.

With 104 acres of pristine wilderness and 3.5 miles of oceanfront, the island is a certifiable semi-tropical paradise. It also has a four-bedroom Spanish villa-style home on it, built in 1928.

Though the asking price is $24.5 million, the owners are looking to move quickly and all serious offers will be considered until April 30th.

For a $100,000 deposit, interested buyers can take a private tour around the island.

Michael Saunders and Company has the listing. 

An entire mass of land in South Florida called Little Bokeelia Island is up for sale.



The island covers 104 acres.



It sits near regular "Bokeelia island", which is itself very close the much larger Pine Island. All the islands sit off the west coast of Florida, near the metropolitan area of Fort Myers.



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Why managing sucks — and how to fix it

$
0
0

michael scott the office

Most likely you have a bad boss or you are one.

According to Gallup's State of the American Workplace report, only 22% of American employees are engaged and thriving in their jobs, and that's largely because they don't feel recognized by their managers. 

San Francisco-based human resources company Achievers says many organizations misunderstand management as the management of people instead of the management of work, which can be the difference between micromanaging and leading.

Achievers, which works with clients like Samsung and Microsoft, has created a presentation illustrating the main ideas of Jody Thompson and Cali Ressler's book "Why Managing Sucks and How to Fix It." We've published it here with their permission.







See the rest of the story at Business Insider

12 NYC restaurants Wall Street should absolutely check out this spring

$
0
0

Bowery Meat Company

Spring is almost upon NYC, so, foodies, step aside, Wall Street will be coming out in full force.

Prepare for a deluge as the luckiest of them depart Miami and return home to the city that never sleeps.

And those who had to stay up north will finally be ending their hibernation, just like the rest of us.

To welcome them, Business Insider put together a list of 12 restaurants Wall Streeters must check out in order to refamiliarize themselves with these snow-free city streets.

Some are date spots (like Navy), some are potential client spots (like Irvington), and others are just a really good time (like Belle Reve and Dirty French).

All of them have incredible food. But we've already said too much.

Irvington — W Hotel Union Square, 201 Park Ave South

Last year hospitality firm Gerber Group gave Wall Street a gift — The Roof at the Viceroy Hotel.

This year, they're bringing the magic to the first floor of the W Hotel Union Square with Irvington, a New American bar and restaurant with Mediterranean-influences, highlighting locally-sourced ingredients from the neighboring Union Square Greenmarket, and freshly rotisserie roasted meats.



Bowery Meat Company — 9 East 1st Street

It's a chic house of meat (which is a sentence I've always dreamed of typing).

Bowery Meat Club was started by a bunch of guys who wanted to build a palace to all things steak, pork and fowl.

What say you, Wall Street?



Dirty French — 180 Ludlow Street

Dirty French was one of the hottest openings of 2014 and its popularity has not abated. If you do manage to get a reservation, you'll enter a restaurant that has optimized opulence.

After all, it's a Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi project.

As Eater genius reviewer Ryan Sutton pointed out, two tables had to be pushed together so waiters could set down his steak. The fish ain't little either.



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

7 mysterious cases relaunched by pop culture

$
0
0

robert durstThe arrest of eccentric billionaire Robert Durst following the airing of an HBO documentary series about his connection to murders and missing persons may be shocking, but it’s hardly the first time legal scrutiny has been ignited by the forces of popular media.

In these seven instances, publicity surrounding pop culture phenomena — from serious documentary features to reality series and even stand-up comedy — led to real-life action that changed the lives of the subjects.

Check out the crazy cases here >

SEE ALSO: HBO filmmakers cancel all press; could be key witnesses against alleged murderer Robert Durst

Podcast "Serial" helped Adnan Syed win the right to appeal his conviction in February.

The groundbreaking 2014 podcast “Serial” attempted to solve the mystery of who killed Hae Min Lee, an 18-year-old high school student who was found strangled to death in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1999.

Lee’s ex-boyfriend and fellow student Adnan Syed was convicted of her murder and has been serving a life sentence, but the podcast reexamines evidence that suggests Syed might not have been responsible — or at the very least, that legal proceedings at the time were flawed.

As part of her research, “Serial” host Sarah Koenig interviewed Deirdre Enright, head of the Innocence Project at the University of Virginia law school. Enright decided of her own accord to take up Syed’s case, and in December 2014, the Innocence Project began the process of filing a motion to examine DNA evidence.

Syed also won the right to appeal his conviction in February based on his lawyer’s failure to utilize a letter potentially confirming an alibi — a key piece of evidence Koenig brought up in her discussions with Syed during the course of recording “Serial.”



TLC's "Sister Wives" launched an investigation into the family on possible charges of bigamy.

Like Durst, the family at the center of TLC’s “Sister Wives” put its potential guilt of a crime front and center in a nationally televised docuseries.

Kody Brown was in a polygamous relationship with three women when the series began in 2010 and married another during the course of the first season. 

Police in their hometown of Lehi, Utah, launched an investigation into the family on possible charges of bigamy the day after the series premiered. Footage from “Sister Wives,” which depicted the marriage ceremony between Brown and newest wife Robyn Sullivan, was used as evidence.

Brown objected to the investigation, arguing that he was only legally married to his first wife, Meri. But in Utah, bigamy — a third-degree felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison for the man and five years for each wife — could also be defined by cohabitation. Brown shared a single massive house with wives Meri, Janelle and Christine and their 13 children, all documented in detail on TLC.

Fearing persecution and prosecution, the family fled to Las Vegas, deeming Nevada a more “polygamy-friendly” state. Utah’s criminal case was ultimately dropped, but Kody Brown won a federal lawsuit challenging Utah’s anti-bigamy statutes on the basis of cohabitation. The state’s appeal is currently pending in the federal court system. 



"The Central Park Five" were awarded $41 million after a documentary revealed all.

In 1989, four black and one Hispanic teenagers were accused of the violent rape of a young white jogger in Central Park.

Despite a lack of physical evidence tying those boys to the case, they were all convicted of charges ranging from rape to assault and attempted murder. 

The Central Park Five, as they came to be known, sued the city of New York for malicious prosecution and racial discrimination in 2003 after their convictions were vacated when DNA evidence exonerated them.

The suit remained tied up in the courts for nearly a decade when Sarah Burns, daughter of legendary documentarian Ken Burns, made a film about the case. “The Central Park Five” premiered at Cannes in 2012, and the filmmakers became advocates for the five men, pushing New York to settle the lawsuit.

Ken Burns said in a 2013 interview that then mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio would settle the case were he to win that year’s election, and on Sept. 4, 2014, the Central Park Five were awarded $41 million. 



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

17 beautiful pictures of automobile graveyards, where vintage cars are being reclaimed by nature

$
0
0

ForestPunk DieterKlein 01

Photographer Dieter Klein doesn't seem to be an automobile aficionado or a gearhead of any kind. So what draws Klein to travel Europe and the United States, exploring the forests and deserts with a camera in hand, searching for vintage cars that have been parked for good and left to rot? 

"More than an interest in the cars themselves, I was struck by the impact of this extraordinary process of transformation," Klein told Business Insider.

Dieter's images of automobile graveyards, places where abandoned cars slowly decay, show both the staying power of these classic cruisers and the strength of the nature around it, engulfing the machines and returning them back to the earth.

His photos have recently been compiled into a book, titled "Forest Punk," for sale now. Klein shared a selection of images and the stories behind them with us.

 

Klein discovered his unusual subject of choice by coincidence, he told Business Insider. He was on a trip to France when he happened upon an aging pickup truck parked and left for years in some bushes.



"It was about 80 years old and had been standing there undisturbed for a good 40 years," he said. "By that time it had pretty well been reclaimed by nature."



Klein says he wasn't much of a car person to be begin with, but the ruin piqued an interest. "The contradiction of nature and this man-made machinery to be left alone for decades in such impressive scenery left a strange impression on me," he said.



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

The amazing rags-to-riches story of Li Ka-Shing, Asia's richest man

$
0
0

Li Ka Shing

Asia's richest man just made yet another massive splash after the company he chairs, Hutchison Whampoa, bought the UK's second largest mobile operator, O2. It already owns Three, and the merger of the two will forge the sector's largest UK mobile firm.

Li Ka-Shing's life story is an amazing rags to riches tale. He's gone from poverty in southern China to become one of the world's top plutocrats, with an estimated net worth of $31.7 billion, according to Bloomberg.

He vies with Alibaba's Jack Ma for the title of Asia's richest man, but he also says his wealth is underestimated by as much as half.

In 1940, when the country was at war with Japan, Li Ka-Shing's family fled from southern China to Hong Kong, where he's lived ever since.



Li's early life was tumultuous. Japan occupied Hong Kong in 1941 (pictured). Li's father died of tuberculosis before age 16 and young Li was forced to leave school to work in a factory.



In 1950, Li Ka Shing set up his first factory, Cheung Kong Industries, which manufactured plastic flowers. A hotel owned by the modern Cheung Kong now stands on the same site.



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

How the 22-year-old founder of Oculus spent the year after Facebook bought his company for $2 billion

$
0
0

Palmer Luckey

It's been exactly one year since Facebook announced it was acquiring virtual reality startup Oculus VR for $2 billion.

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey is just 22 years old. He created his first virtual reality headsets in his garage as a teen, eventually turning Oculus into a full-fledged startup at 19. 

Forbes estimates that Luckey's wealth has swollen to more than $500 million as a result of the Facebook deal.

Still, he hasn't adopted a flashy lifestyle just yet. We've taken a look at how the virtual reality superstar has spent the last year. 

Luckey currently lives in Atherton, a ritzy Silicon Valley town that's home to Google chairman Eric Schmidt and HP CEO Meg Whitman, among other wealthy tech executives. Luckey, however, lives with seven friends in a home he calls "The Commune," where they all spend hours playing video games. This is an example of a home you might find in Atherton.

Source: Forbes



Luckey spends a lot of his time in an executive-level suite at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, but he's still very laid-back. "There’s a lot of people here who know all about Oculus but don’t know who I am,” he told Forbes.

Source: Forbes



Luckey is known for his casual look — he typically sports a Hawaiian shirt and sandals, but he has said that he'd prefer to be barefoot. "We invented shoes to protect our feet from the harsh environment," he told the Telegraph. "But I live in modern-day California. It’s pretty safe here. Nothing’s going to happen if I take them off."

Source: The Telegraph

 



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Here are the winners of the 2014 US Military Photographer Awards

$
0
0

military photo

A panel of judges in Fort Meade, Maryland have made their selections for the 2014 Military Photographer awards

The judges have handed out awards to military photographers for their amazing work in ten different categories including Sports, Pictorial, and Combat Documentation (Operational). The judges have also named the overall best military photographer for 2014. 

Air Force Staff Sgt. Vernon Young was selected as the Military Photographer of the year. His photos ranged from evocative portraits of Afghans to scenes of US forces training before deployment. 

"Recon Patrols" (First Place: Combat Documentation, Operational)

Soldiers assigned to Palehorse Troop, 4th Squadron, 2nd Calvary Regiment move over rough terrain during Operation Alamo Scout 13, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, on Feb. 10, 2014. The operation was a joint effort between Palehorse troops and the Afghan National Army's 205th Corps Mobile Strike Force to conduct reconnaissance patrols in villages around Kandahar Airfield.



"Wounded Warrior" (Second Place: Combat Documentation, Operational)

Casualties airlifted by an Afghan Air Force C-130 Hercules from a Taliban attack on Camp Bastion, are offloaded on Dec. 1, 2014 at Kabul International Airport. The Afghan military successfully repelled the attack on the camp after receiving control of the base from coalition forces a month earlier.



"Afghan Gunner" (Third Place: Combat Documentation, Operational)

An Afghan Air Force (AAF) Mi-17 aerial gunner fires an M-240 machine gun while flying over a weapons range March 13, 2014, near Kabul, Afghanistan. US Air Force Airmen from the 438th Air Expeditionary Wing/NATO Air Training Command-Afghanistan flew a night-vision goggle training mission with an AAF aircrew to further increase the operational capability of the AAF.



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Marrakesh, Morocco, was just named the most popular travel destination in the world

$
0
0

marrakech morocco souk

TripAdvisor recently released a list of the most popular travel destinations in the world, based on millions of user reviews, and Marrakesh, Morocco, took the No. 1 spot on the list.

This is the first time that the Moroccan city has topped the list, but it's been gaining popularity as a tourist destination with Britons and Europeans over the last several years. 

With its bustling souks, flavorful food, and famously welcoming hospitality, it's no wonder that tourists are starting to take note of Marrakesh.

Located in the northwest of Morocco, Marrakesh is world-famous for its souks, which are large markets.



Here's where you can buy everything from clothes and textiles to specialty foods and more.



Colorful spices are stacked high.



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Epically awesome photos of Mars

$
0
0

15_ESP_023829_1350_Millipedes_of_Mars br2

Mars might not look like much from Earth, but close up, it's a perfect spectacle of natural beauty.

Since 2006, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft has been orbiting Mars snapping pictures of the surface with its HiRISE camera.

Here is a collection of some of the most incredible images the camera has taken over the years.

The HiRISE images shown here have false coloring that highlights distinct Martian features, like sand dunes shown in the image to the right. The false-coloring helps scientists see how the grooves and troughs of these features change over time.

During the summer on Mars' north pole, all of the surface ice is gone revealing the cracked surface underneath. The cracks are likely from underground ice expanding and contracting with the seasons.



Dark and light streaks crawl up a ridge in this picture of the Acheron Fossae region. Scientists debate over how the different-colored streaks formed, but they agree that the darker streaks are younger that turn into the lighter streaks over time.



Believe it or not Mars has dust devils and this mesmerizing picture shows the tracks that they trace in the sandy Martian surface.



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

THE INTERNET OF EVERYTHING: 2015 [SLIDE DECK]

$
0
0

Number Of Devices In The Internet Of EverythingThe way we access the internet has changed rapidly over the past few years, transitioning from desktops to mobile devices.

Now, the internet is expanding again — coming to all of the everyday devices found in our homes, businesses, and cities.

BI Intelligence has created a slideshow highlighting the most important ways the Internet of Everything market will develop, the benefits newly connected devices will offer consumers and businesses, and the potential barriers that could inhibit growth. 

BI Intelligence is a new research and analysis service focused on the mobile and Internet of Things computing markets. 

Only BI Intelligence subscribers can download the individual charts and datasets in Excel, along with the PowerPoint and PDF versions of this deck. Please sign up for a trial membership here.







See the rest of the story at Business Insider

10 of the bravest moves Steve Jobs made at Apple (AAPL)

$
0
0

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was known for his bold vision, but that kind of success doesn't come without taking any risks.

Jobs co-founded Apple and brought the company back to life after he briefly left, saving it from crashing. That meant making hard choices and going with decisions he wasn't sure were going to work out.

Jobs' history at Apple is full of them, and Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli document them well in their new book "Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader." 

He went with his gut and hired John Sculley.

Jobs made plenty of hiring decisions that didn't work out, but his big bet on John Sculley might have been the riskiest. Jobs convinced Scully to come to Apple in 1983 and believed he would be the right Fortune 500 executive to help him lead the company. But, despite Scully's experience at PepsiCo, it turns out there were a lot of things Scully didn't understand about Apple's business, as Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli write in their book. It didn't end well. 



Then he tried to get Sculley fired when things didn't work out. Ultimately, that move backfired on Jobs.

When Jobs' relationship with Sculley didn't turn out like he had imagined, he planned to get him fired. He told his closest confidants that he intended to oust Sculley over Memorial Day weekend while Sculley was in China. But Jean-Louis Gassee, Apple's director of European  operations at the time, ratted on Jobs. The whole board turned against him.



He created a commercial for the Mac that was so controversial that it only aired once.

Apple's "1984" commercial may be one of the most famous ads in history. Jobs didn't even let Apple's board see the ad until the day before the Super Bowl in 1984, and they were horrified, according to Schlender and Tetzeli's book. They even sold one of their ad blocks so that the commercial only appeared once. 



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Facebook's F8 is always the quirkiest tech show of the year — see for yourself

$
0
0

museum resurrected f8

Every big tech company has at least one major event per year in San Francisco: Apple, Google, Oracle, Salesforce, Microsoft....

But there's something about Facebook's F8 developer event that's always a little ... different.

The light is usually low, giving it kind of a night club vibe. There's always tons of cool stuff you can play with, even if it doesn't relate directly to Facebook. The execs often mingle with the crowd.

Here, see for yourself.

F8 is chill. There's lots of violet light everywhere. Attendees can relax on colorful beanbag chairs.



At this station, you can take animated GIFs of yourself using one of the new Messenger apps and get it up on the screen, and you get a static print to take home.



This "teleportation station" lets you virtually travel to the Facebook campus in Menlo Park using a Samsung Gear VR headset. On the other end, Facebook hacked together a 360-degree camera using six GoPros.



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

The crazy, wind-powered life of Dale Vince, Britain's richest hippie

$
0
0

brighter dale vince FULLDale Vince, the CEO of Britain's biggest green energy supplier Ecotricity, is not your typical multimillionaire corporate executive.

He left school at 15 to join a hippy commune where he lived in an old fire engine. Through his environmental activism, he managed to turn a makeshift turbine, which generated electricity for his dilapidated travelling home on wheels, into a massive green energy empire that now has more than 155,000 customers.

But he is also famous for his legal spats.

He's currently suing Elon Musk's Tesla for allegedly stealing Ecotricity’s intellectual property. His ex-wife Kathleen Wyatt is also trying to claim millions of pounds in child-support cash from him, despite their divorce in 1992, four years before he even launched Ecotricity.

His life is still pretty wild. We pieced together his biography from interviews and reports from the Daily Mail, The Independent, and the Guardian

Dale Vince was born on August 29, 1961, in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk.



Not much is known about Vince's childhood. But he must have been enthralled with Yarmouth's free and easy seaside environment from an early age ...



... because at 15, he left school to be part of a ‘Peace Convoy’ of hippies.



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

19 high-paying jobs for people who don't like stress

$
0
0

man in suit relaxing on bench

Think there's no such thing as a high-paying, low-stress job?

Think again.

Career-information expert Laurence Shatkin, Ph.D., compared average salaries and stress levels of the 767 occupations identified by the US Department of Labor to identify jobs with that perfect combination of high pay and low stress, and it turns out there are plenty.

The stress tolerance for each job is a rating on a scale from zero to 100, where a lower rating signals less stress. It measures how frequently workers must accept criticism and deal effectively with high stress on the job. The data was gathered from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Occupational Information Network (O*NET).

Vivian Giang contributed to an earlier version of this article.

Materials Scientists

Stress tolerance: 53.0

Average annual salary: $94,350

What they do: Research and study substances at the atomic and molecular levels and the ways in which substances react with each other; use knowledge to develop new and improved products.

Education requirements: At least a bachelor’s degree; master’s degree or Ph.D. is needed for many research jobs.

Stress tolerance is measured by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Occupational Information Network, with lower scores indicating less stress on the job.



Food Scientists

Stress tolerance: 55.8

Average annual salary: $66,870

What they do: Ensure that agricultural establishments are productive and food is safe.

Education requirements:At least a bachelor’s degree from an accredited postsecondary institution; many get a doctoral degree.

Stress tolerance is measured by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Occupational Information Network, with lower scores indicating less stress on the job.



Mathematicians

Stress tolerance: 57.3

Average annual salary: $104,350

What they do: Conduct research in fundamental mathematics or in application of mathematical techniques to science, management, and other fields. Solve problems in various fields using mathematical methods.

Education requirements: Bachelor's or master's degree for those who want to work in government, and a doctorate may be required to work for private companies.

Stress tolerance is measured by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Occupational Information Network, with lower scores indicating less stress on the job.



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

22 successful entrepreneurs share their best productivity hacks

$
0
0

barbara corcoran

Besides money, time is the greatest commodity an entrepreneur can have.

It makes sense, then, that the most successful ones have figured out some handy productivity hacks to make the most of their days.

We've collected some of the best we've found from entrepreneurs of a wide range of industries and experience levels.

Asana CEO Dustin Moskovitz has No Meetings Wednesdays.

Moskovitz is one of the cofounders of Facebook, as well as one of the cofounders of software company Asana.

He keeps his schedule free in the middle of every week to have one day of uninterrupted work.

It's "an invaluable tool for ensuring you have some contiguous space to do project work,"he writes on Quora.



Beth Doane, founder of Raintees, lets all calls go to voicemail.

In 2008, Doane created Raintees, an apparel line that plants a tree in an endangered rainforest for every shirt sold and donates school supplies to a child in need for every tote bag sold.

Leading a growing company requires her full focus. Doane lets all of her non-scheduled calls go to voicemail, or else she would never get anything done, she says.

"I tend to return calls at the end of the day, and if someone really needs to reach me I have my assistant's info on my voicemail and let her decide if it's really an 'important' call." 



Eric Casaburi, founder and CEO of Retro Fitness, multitasks by combining a "brainless" activity with a "brain-required" activity.

Casaburi founded the first Retro Fitness in 2004 as an affordable gym for fitness buffs of all intensity levels. His franchise now has locations across the country and continues to grow.

He thinks multi-tasking is key for productivity, but only if it combines a mindless task with one that requires focus.

"For example, you could exercise on a treadmill while taking a conference call (something that I do frequently)," he says. "Yes you will be winded, but I assure you it won't affect your thinking and communication skills. In fact, there are studies that show the brain neurons fire off at a higher rate while active!"



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

The secret to making perfect pasta in 11 easy steps

$
0
0

IMG_0104.JPG

New York Times food writer Mark Bittman claims to have discovered the secret to perfect pasta: water.

In the New York Times Magazine last week, Bittman wrote about this discovery during a recent trip to Rome while hanging out with a chef named Flavio de Maio:

...the secret, as it turns out, is to stir the mostly cooked pasta quite vigorously so that its starch emulsifies with the seasonings and added water. 

After reading this, I wondered if it really could be so simple. Over the weekend, I gave it a try with Bittman's recipe for cacio e pepe (cheese and pepper pasta). Three ingredients: pasta, cheese, and pepper. Plus the starchy pasta water of course. 

It turns out that to make an amazing dish — a simple but hearty upgrade from mac and cheese — it takes about 20 minutes all in. I eat gluten free (I know), so I made this recipe twice, with regular pasta and gluten free pasta, to see if they both came out creamy. 

As expected, the pasta with gluten came out smoother and creamier, but for quinoa pasta, the gluten free stuff was pretty good. The leftovers were also softer than the usual basically-raw-again crunchy stuff that you usually get when you try to eat gluten free pasta after its been in the fridge. 

(Big thanks to my wonderful co-chef, Steve Rousseau)

This is what you'll need. A box of pasta, some olive oil, water, salt, pepper, and two kinds of cheese (a cup and a half of Parmesan and a cup of Romano, grated). The recipe serves two, more or less.



Start making the pasta. Add salt to water in a pot, then bring it to a boil, then add the pasta. Some people will tell you that adding salt makes the water boil faster. This is incorrect. Adding salt makes the pasta more delicious. Cook the pasta for the number of minutes directed on the box, minus one.



While your pasta is cooking, make the cheese paste. Combine the grated cheese, salt, and pepper with "just enough cold water to make a thick paste." Mash it together and spread it around the bowl.



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

The humble first jobs of 15 highly successful people

Viewing all 61683 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images