WSJ: ““Toy Tycoon” is a role-playing strategy game for up-and-coming leaders. Promising managers inside Hasbro chosen to play the game become CEOs for the day, facing decisions like whether to push into electronic games or go all-in on plush toys. Is that Marvel or Pokémon license worth it? How about that star hire? How much product should they produce? Did they hit the plan communicated to Wall Street? “I think the job of a CEO is very similar to a grand strategy game,” said Hasbro Chief Executive Chris Cocks…The goal of the game is to help the player executives think through how to manage their company’s cash, time and other resources—and pivoting when the most thoughtful plans are torpedoed. Players aim to build a brand, scale a business and smartly apply market research. Milestones include hiring the best talent, controlling inventory and dominating a category.”
NYTimes: “Build real-world strength. Nearly all of your everyday movements, even ones as simple as getting into and out of a chair, use multiple joints and muscles. And just like any feat of strength, training can help you perform those movements properly and without pain. “We have to think about daily life as an athletic event,” said Disa Hatfield, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Rhode Island. “You want to remain a competitor as long as possible.” Most of your everyday tasks involve one of these six movements: hinge, squat, lunge, push, pull, rotate. All of these motions can be trained in the gym using your body weight or minimal equipment. Start by doing a full-body workout that incorporates those movements twice a week. Make sure to take 48 hours of rest between full-body workouts to properly recover.”
Stephen Batchelor: “The four tasks are a way of understanding the primary logic of the Buddha’s teaching — or the dharma, as we call it. It derives from the Buddha’s very first discourse. These tasks are, first, to embrace life, to embrace suffering. In other words, to resist the tendency whenever something disagreeable is happening to recoil away — but be able to say yes to life. It’s very much an affirmation of the reality you find yourself in that given moment. That’s the first task. The second task is to let our reactivity be. So if you’re in a difficult situation and anger is your initial reaction, to notice the anger, to be mindful of the anger and to watch the anger arise. And also, if you leave it alone, to let the anger fade away. That’s the second task: letting reactivity be or letting reactivity go. The third task is when your mind is beginning to calm down and not be so reactive that you come to appreciate a nonreactive space within you. The third task is to dwell in that nonreactive space… The fourth task is to cultivate a way of life, to cultivate a path. That means that this nonreactive space is not a nirvana in the sense of the enlightenment or the goal of the path, but it’s actually the most appropriate space for making more useful and effective judgments and choices.”
WSJ: “When Kraft and Heinz, two of the biggest names in American food, merged in 2015, the combined company was supposed to breathe new life into old brands. Instead, years of cost cutting, underinvestment and corporate chaos left Kraft Heinz’s $26 billion food empire—home to bedrock brands like Heinz’s Tomato Ketchup, Philadelphia Cream Cheese and Kool-Aid—vulnerable to both buzzier premium ones and cheaper supermarket knockoffs. Kraft Heinz sales have dropped for eight straight quarters.”
