Number of words: 217 By far the most striking thing about the museum of failed products, though, has to do with the fact that it exists as a viable, profit-making business in the first place. You might have assumed that any consumer product manufacturer worthy of the name would have its own such collection, a … Read more

Number of words: 89 With no proper sanitation, Kibera’s primary means of disposing of human waste is what the slum-dwellers wryly refer to as ‘flying toilets’: the practice of defecating into a plastic bag, then flinging it as far from your own home as possible. Flying toilets add diarrhoea and typhoid fever to the neighbourhood’s … Read more

Number of words: 383 The security scanning procedures at Philadelphia, in common with those across America and the rest of the world, were becoming progressively tighter. Less than a month previously, Richard Reid, the would-be ‘shoe bomber’, had been tackled and subdued on board a flight from Paris to Miami, thereby intiating the era of … Read more

Number of words: 308 Shapiro did, in fact, start out as an all-American achiever, committed to his goal of becoming a highly paid management consultant. His punishing hours destroyed his marriage. ‘I’m not sure if my goals drove me to work the crazy hours I did,’ he later wondered,’ or if I used my goals … Read more

Number of words: 177 This problem goes to deeper than one might think. The standard answer to it, from the proponents of goalsetting, is that these are examples of people setting the wrong goals – overly ambitious or everly narrow ones. Of course, it’s true that some goals are wiser than others. But the more … Read more

Number of words: 327 One illuminating example of the problem concerns the American automobile behemoth General Motors. The turn of the millennium found GM in a serious predicament, losing customers and profit to more nimble, primarily Japanese, competitors. Following Latham and Locke’s philosophy to the letter, executives at GM’s headquarters in Detroit came up with … Read more

Number of words: 253 The Latin word finis has two meanings: the end or the finish, and a goal to reach. A man who could not see the end of his “provisional existence” was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life. He ceased living for the nature, in contrast to a man … Read more

Number of words: 249 It was my turn. Somebody whispered to me that to be sent to the right side would mean work, the way to the left being for the sick and those incapable of work, who would be sent to a special camp. I just waited for things to take their course, the … Read more

Number of words: 555 Life on Earth is complex and varied, but every living organism on the planet builds its proteins from the same set of 20 amino acids. All proteins in a human body, for example, are made up of some combination of the 20 common amino acids. But how exactly did that happen? … Read more

Number of words: 460 Porsche’s new Surface Coated Brake system uses white calipers, a nod to the fact that the mirror-finish tungsten carbide-coated rotors drastically reduce brake dust. There’s usually a compromise between brake pad performance and brake dust (high-performance pads tend to generate more schmutz on your wheels) but that’s not the only reason … Read more