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Warren Buffett is likely the best-known, most successful investor in the world today. The philanthropist and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway has an estimated net worth of $158 billion and is known as the Oracle of Omaha for his ability to pick long-term investments. Hes also dedicated to sharing his wisdom with everyday investors, including beginners. Here are Buffetts top three tips: Principle No. 1: Invest Only in What You Understand Buffett has famously advised, Never invest in a business you cannot understand. In a letter to Berkshire Hathaways shareholders in 1996, Buffett explained the concept of a circle of competence: Basically, these are the fields that you truly understand and are knowledgeable enough to evaluate. You don’t have to be an expert on every company, or even many, Buffett said. You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital. For example, Buffett famously stayed out of tech stocks early on because he felt he couldnt truly evaluate the investment opportunities himself. At a 2019 stockholders meeting, Buffett advised investors to try and learn as much as they can about as many businesses as possible and then figure out which ones they truly understand and have knowledge on. That, he said, would put them ahead of most other investors. If youre an investor whod like to build your own portfolio, sticking to what you know is vital. Youll be able to evaluate each business for yourself and understand the true relevance of new developments over time. Meanwhile, if youre investing in something just because someone else says its a good idea, youre entirely dependent on their judgment, which may not be as sound as they claim or believe it is. If you dont have the time or inclination to study individual businesses thoroughly enough to make these judgments for yourself, Buffett recommends investing in an S&P 500 index fund as the best option for most investors. Principle No. 2: Avoid Unnecessary Activity You dont get paid for activity, you only get paid for being right, Buffett said in 1998. Especially as a beginning investor, youll likely get the urge to react to news about the market or your individual investments immediately. Its easy to panic when an earnings announcement sends the value of your equity down 5% or more in a day. But Buffett preaches patience: If youve done your due diligence and youre investing only in stocks you have strong reason to believe will pay off in the long run, a little market noise along the way shouldnt scare you off. Inactivity strikes us as intelligent behavior,” he said in his 1996 letter. If youre sure youre investing only in strong, well-managed businesses, then you need to trade only when those qualities arent true anymore. Stocks and the market tend to grow in value over time. By trading too frequently, you may find yourself reinvesting in stocks at higher prices than you originally bought them atlosing out on gains, dividend payments, and any trading fees in the processor losing out on higher long-term profits. Principle No. 3: Make Every Investment Decision Count In a speech at the USC Marshall School of Business in 1994, Charlie Munger, cofounder of Berkshire Hathaway, said that Buffett believes most investors would be better off in the long run if he could give each one a ticket with only 20 slots . . . representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. The root of this advice is the same as Buffetts other investing principles: A limit of 20 investments forces you to carefully consider every move, to be patient, and to not invest in businesses you dont understand. Youd also ensure youre confident enough about each investment that its worth missing out on another investment in the future. Think about it: If you were buying a house or a car, would you buy it sight unseen, without an inspection, or on the word of some random person online? Probably not. Your investments deserve nearly as much deliberation. Buffett said in 1996 that every investors goal should simply be to purchase stocks in businesses that they are virtually certain will be earning more money in 5, 10, or 20 years. This diligence and patience has made Buffett one of the richest men in the world and could help your portfolio as well.
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E-Commerce
As the founder of a high-growth SaaS business, Evan was the quintessential entrepreneur. Ideas and innovation were his strength, and they led to his success in attracting investors and inspiring his early hires. With the infusion of investment capital, the company entered a new stage of growth. To scale successfully, the business needed to standardize operations and develop repeatable processes to reliably deliver services to its customers. But these were not Evans strengths. With a near-constant flow of ideas and a desire to resource them, he soon earned a new nickname among his team: chief distraction officer. Eventually, investors grew tired of Evans lack of focus and replaced him with a seasoned operator who had the operational capabilities necessary to grow. The skills that make founders successful often become liabilities as a business builds. As executive coach Marshall Goldsmith says, What got you here wont get you there. Here are five leadership behaviors that break at scaleand where the fixes lie. 1. Creativity over Discipline Evan was a perfect example of someone whose creativity and passion were a perfect fit for a founder. As his business progressed to the next stage of growth, the primary skill required was the ability to build out processes, to systematize the product so that it would be delivered to clients consistently every time. But highly entrepreneurial leaders often find it draining to limit their focus to only the one or two proven products. Whats the solution for the mismatch of a founders talents to this later stage of growth? The most successful ones recognize new skills are needed, have the humility to accept their own limitations, find a great COO, and get out of that persons way. 2. High Appetite for Risk When starting out, its important to take risks, try new things, learn from your mistakes, and try again. As companies scale, though, the focus should turn to building stability and predictability. Sudden shifts in strategy and focus cause uncertainty and inconsistency, which erode the trust and confidence of customers, employees, and investors. How do leaders balance the need for continuous innovation with stability and predictability? Former Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg offer a great framework for continuing to innovate as you scale: the 70/20/10 rule. The idea calls for allocating 70% of capital to the core business, 20% to emerging products and services, and 10% to the cutting-edge, higher-risk ideas. This framework ensures that innovation is always happeningbut not at the expense of the core business. 3. Command-and-Control Leadership Founders are notorious for having their hands in every decision, from product development and pricing to the paint color of the office. As the company scales, this level of involvement is no longer possible. Founders have to bring on new leaders to mobilize, motivate, and manage a larger number of employees. But bringing in leaders is the easy part: Moving to distributed leadership, where the company is truly led by a team instead of an individual, is harder. Distributed leadership calls for founder CEOs to step out of the day-to-day operational decisions, delegate, trust, and empower those on their team to drive results. Allowing others to share the management responsibilities pays enormous dividends. Beside the obvioushaving others to lean on for their knowledge and expertiseit also helps to ensure the stability and continuity of the business. Only by distributing leadership will CEOs be able to elevate their role to focus more on leading strategy. 4. Open-Door Communication Early-stage leaders enjoy the close proximity of their team and the ability to communicate in real time. It can be really challenging for CEOs to break the habit of communicating informally and directly with everyone at the company. To scale successfully, a CEO needs to shift to more measured and intentional communication. As Google was growing rapidly in the early 2000s, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin faced the challenge of shifting from being player-coaches who shared an office with fellow software engineers to becoming key executives of a publicly traded company. To help themand their employeesenforce new and necessary boundaries, the two hired a key executive assistant. That new hire served as a filter for their email and a bouncer for their office, with their role empowered to moderate the flow of people in and out so the executives could be more disciplined with their time and focus. 5. Valuing Relationships over Accountability A key ingredient to building a successful company is a high-performing teamand most startups dont begin with one. Founder CEOs often describe their initial team as a family who have bonded with each other through the intense challenges of the startup experience. Sometimes, early employees are actual familysiblings, spouses, and children are often part of the act, bringing all of their relationship dynamics with them. High-performing teams, by contrast, run on accountability. Those who are not able to deliver the required results wont make it, regardless of their relationship to the founder. Adding accountability structures like job descriptions, goal-setting, and performance management helps to ensure the team is on track to execute. These processes also help to shine a light on anyone who is unable to adapt to the new demands of the larger and more complex organization. Inevitably, founders will be forced to make some difficult decisions regarding some of the early team members to make way for new talent who can drive results and take the business to the next level. Building a sustainable, stable growth engine with double-digit year-over-year growth is hard. Each new stage of growth brings new challenges that require a different set of skills. The most successful leaders are those who understand the need to adapt their behaviors to meet the next stageand what it demands.
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E-Commerce
Have you heard of Maycember? According to social media, it’s a term that describes the hectic nature and mounting expenses families face around May, particularly parents with children, due to the increased cost of everything from graduation gifts to summer camps and family vacations, which combined with inflation (and tariffs), have made May feel extra expensive, just like the winter holiday season. That’s as total spending for college and graduation gifts is expected to reach a record $6.8 billion in 2025, up from $6.1 billion in 2024, according to the National Retail Federation. And U.S. consumer spending was up in May 2024, even as prices remained stable; the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index was unchanged last May but still marked a 2.6% year-over-year rise, according to financial news site Finimize. (On the consumer side, spending increased by 0.2%, maintaining momentum from Aprils 0.1% rise, aided by a 0.5% bump in personal income.) May often feels like a second December because so many expenses pile up at once, Isabel Barrow, executive director of financial planning at Edelman Financial Engines, told CNBC. Some of those expenses include graduation, Mother’s Day, camp, summer travel, and weddings. Some families might also have higher grocery bills when children come home from college to visit for July 4, or throughout summer until Labor Day weekend. And the end of spring brings a flurry of activities that mark the end of the school year and the beginning of summer, which can often require paying up for tickets, gear, or other related expenses, including school events like dance or music recitals, kids’ sports tournaments, field trips, and end-of-year projects. But just where exactly did the term “Maycember” come from, anyway? The word got out after the Holderness family, popular on social media, posted a funny YouTube video that went viral, garnering 270,000-plus views. The family has since posted another Maycember parody. Meanwhile, a number of parents have also taken to social media to post and commiserate about Maycember; a recent Instagram post from Scary Mommy got more than 23,000 likes and even more shares.
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E-Commerce
Twice a year, New Yorkers and visitors are treated to a phenomenon known as Manhattanhenge, when the setting sun aligns with the Manhattan street grid and sinks below the horizon framed in a canyon of skyscrapers. The event is a favorite of photographers and often brings people out onto sidewalks on spring and summer evenings to watch this unique sunset. The first Manhattanhenge of the year takes place Wednesday at 8:13 p.m., with a slight variation happening again Thursday at 8:12 p.m. It will occur again on July 11 and 12. Some background on the phenomenon: Where does the name Manhattanhenge come from? Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson coined the term in a 1997 article in the magazine Natural History. Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, said he was inspired by a visit to Stonehenge as a teenager. The future host of TV shows such as PBSs Nova ScienceNow was part of an expedition led by Gerald Hawkins, the scientist who first theorized that Stonehenge’s mysterious megaliths were an ancient astronomical observatory. It struck Tyson, a native New Yorker, that the setting sun framed by Manhattan’s high-rises could be compared to the sun’s rays striking the center of the Stonehenge circle on the solstice. Unlike the Neolithic Stonehenge builders, the planners who laid out Manhattan did not mean to channel the sun. It just worked out that way. When is Manhattanhenge? Manhattanhenge does not take place on the summer solstice itself, which is June 20 this year. Instead, it happens about three weeks before and after the solstice. That’s when the sun aligns itself perfectly with the Manhattan grid’s east-west streets. Viewers get two different versions of the phenomenon to choose from. On May 28 and July 12, half the sun will be above the horizon and half below it at the moment of alignment with Manhattan’s streets, according to the Hayden Planetarium. On May 29 and July 11, the whole sun will appear to hover between buildings just before sinking into the New Jersey horizon across the Hudson River. Where can you see Manhattanhenge? The traditional viewing spots are along the city’s broad east-west thoroughfares: 14th Street, 23rd Street, 34th Street, 42nd Street, and 57th Street. The farther east you go, the more dramatic the vista as the sun’s rays hit building facades on either side. It is also possible to see Manhattanhenge across the East River in the Long Island City section of Queens. Is Manhattanhenge an organized event? Manhattanhenge viewing parties are not unknown, but it is mostly a DIY affair. People gather on east-west streets a half-hour or so before sunset and snap photo after photo as dusk approaches. That’s if the weather is fine. There’s no visible Manhattanhenge on rainy or cloudy days, and both are unfortunately in the forecast this week. Do other cities have henges? Similar effects occur in other cities with uniform street grids. Chicagohenge and Baltimorehenge happen when the setting sun lines up with the grid systems in those cities in March and September, around the spring and fall equinoxes. Torontohenge occurs in February and October. But Manhattanhenge is particularly striking because of the height of the buildings and the unobstructed path to the Hudson.
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E-Commerce
In cities across the U.S., the housing crisis has reached a breaking point. Rents are skyrocketing, homelessness is rising and working-class neighborhoods are threatened by displacement. These challenges might feel unprecedented. But they echo a moment more than half a century ago. In the 1950s and 1960s, housing and urban inequality were at the center of national politics. American cities were grappling with rapid urban decline, segregated and substandard housing, and the fallout of highway construction and urban renewal projects that displaced hundreds of thousands of disproportionately low-income and Black residents. The federal government decided to try to do something about it. President Lyndon B. Johnson launched one of the most ambitious experiments in urban policy: the Model Cities Program. As a scholar of housing justice and urban planning, Ive studied how this short-lived initiative aimed to move beyond patchwork fixes to poverty and instead tackle its structural causes by empowering communities to shape their own futures. Building a great society The Model Cities Program emerged in 1966 as part of Johnsons Great Society agenda, a sweeping effort to eliminate poverty, reduce racial injustice and expand social welfare programs in the United States. Earlier urban renewal programs had been roundly criticized for displacing communities of color. Much of this displacement occurred through federally funded highway and slum clearance projects that demolished entire neighborhoods and often left residents without decent options for new housing. So the Johnson administration sought a more holistic approach. The Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act established a federal framework for cities to coordinate housing, education, employment, health care and social services at the neighborhood level. To qualify for the program, cities had to apply for planning grants by submitting a detailed proposal that included an analysis of neighborhood conditions, long-term goals and strategies for addressing problems. New York City neighborhoods designated for revitalization with funding from the Model Cities Program. [Map: The City of New York, Community Development Program: A Progress Report, December 1968] Federal funds went directly to city governments, which then distributed them to local agencies and community organizations through contracts. These funds were relatively flexible but had to be tied to locally tailored plans. For example, Kansas City, Missouri, used Model Cities funding to support a loan program that expanded access to capital for local small businesses, helping them secure financing that might otherwise have been out of reach. Unlike previous programs, Model Cities emphasized what Johnson described as comprehensive and concentrated efforts. It wasnt just about rebuilding streets or erecting public housing. It was about creating new ways for government to work in partnership with the people most affected by poverty and racism. A revolutionary approach to poverty What made Model Cities unique wasnt just its scale but its philosophy. At the heart of the program was an insistence on widespread citizen participation, which required cities that received funding to include residents in the planning and oversight of local programs. The program also drew inspiration from civil rights leaders. One of its early architects, Whitney M. Young Jr., had called for a Domestic Marshall Plan a reference to the federal governments efforts to rebuild Europe after World War II to redress centuries of racial inequality. Civil rights activist Whitney M. Young Jr. helped shape the vision of the Model Cities Pogram. [Photo: Bettmann/Getty Images] Youngs vision helped shape the Model Cities framework, which proposed targeted systemic investments in housing, health, education, employment and civic leadership in minority communities. In Atlanta, for example, the Model Cities Program helped fund neighborhood health clinics and job training programs. But the program also funded leadership councils that for the first time gave local low-income residents a direct voice in how city funds were spent. In other words, neighborhood residents werent just beneficiaries. They were planners, advisers and, in some cases, staffers. This commitment to community participation gave rise to a new kind of public servant what sociologists Martin and Carolyn Needleman famously called guerrillas in the bureaucracy. A Model Cities staffer discusses the program to a group of students gathered at Denvers Metropolitan Youth Education Center in 1970. [Photo: Bill Wunsch/The Denver Post via Getty Images] These were radical plannersoften young, idealistic and deeply embedded in the neighborhoods they served. Many were recruited and hired through new Model Cities funding that allowed local governments to expand their staff with community workers aligned with the programs goals. Working from within city agencies, these new planners used their positions to challenge top-down decision-making and push for community-driven planning. Their work was revolutionary not because they dismantled institutions but because they reimagined how institutions could function, prioritizing the voices of residents long excluded from power. Strengthening community ties In cities across the country, planners fought to redirect public resources toward locally defined priorities. In some cities, such as Tucson, the program funded education initiatives such as bilingual cultural programming and college scholarships for local students. In Baltimore, it funded mobile health services and youth sports programs. A mobile dentist office in Baltimore. [Photo: Robert Breck Chapman Collection, Langsdale Library Special Collections, University of Baltimore] In New York City, the program supported new kinds of housing projects called vest-pocket developments, which got their name from their smaller scale: midsize buildings or complexes built on vacant lots or underutilized land. New housing such as the Betances Houses in the South Bronx were designed to add density without major redevelopment taking placea direct response to midcentury urban renewal projects, which had destroyed and displaced entire neighborhoods populated by the citys poorest residents. Meanwhile, cities such as Seattle used the funds to renovate older apartment buildings instead of tearing them down, which helped preserve the character of local neighborhoods. The goal was to create affordable housing while keeping communities intact. An Atlanta neighborhood identified as a candidate for street paving and home rehabilitation as part of the Model Cities Program. [Photo: Georgia State University Special Collections] What went wrong? Despite its ambitious vision, Model Cities faced resistance almost from the start. The program was underfunded and politically fragile. While some officials had hoped for US$2 billion in annual funding, the actual allocation was closer to $500 million to $600 million, spread across more than 60 cities. Then the political winds shifted. Though designed during the optimism of the mid-1960s, the program started being implemented under President Richard Nixon in 1969. His administration pivoted away from people programs and toward capital investment and physical development. Requirements for resident participation were weakened, and local officials often maintained control over the process, effectively marginalizing the everyday citizens the program was meant to empower. In cities such as San Francisco and Chicago, residents clashed with bureaucrats over control, transparency and decision-making. In some places, participation was reduced to token advisory roles. In others, internal conflict and political pressure made sustained community governance nearly impossible. Critics, including Black community workers and civil rights activists, warned that the program risked becoming a new form of neocolonialism, one that used the language of empowerment while concentrating control in the hands of white elected officials and federal administrators. A legacy worth revisiting Although the program was phased out by 1974, its legacy lived on. In cities across the country, Model Cities trained a generation of Black and brown civic leaders in what community development leaders and policy advocates John A. Sasso and Priscilla Foley called a little noticed revolution. In their book of the same name, they describe how those involved in the program went on to serve in local government, start nonprofits and advocate for community development. It also left an imprint on later policies. Efforts such as participatory budgeting, community land trusts and neighborhood planning initiatives owe a debt to Model Cities insistence that residents should help shape the future of their communities. And even as some criticized the program for failing to meet its lofty goals, others saw its value in creating space for democratic experimentation. A housing meeting takes place at a local Model Cities field office in Baltimore in 1972. [Photo: Robert Breck Chapman Collection, Langsdale Library Special Collections, University of Baltimore] Todays housing crisis demands structural solutions to structural problems. The affordable housing crisis is deeply connected to other intersecting crises, such as climate change, environmental injustice and health disparities, creating compounding risks for the most vulnerable communities. Addressing these issues through a fragmented social safety netwhether through housing vouchers or narrowly targeted benefit programshas proven ineffective. Today, as policymakers once again debate how to respond to deepening inequality and a lack of affordable housing, the lost promise of Model Cities offers vital lessons. Model Cities was far from perfect. But it offered a vision of how democratic, local planning could promote health, security and community. Deyanira Nevárez Martínez is an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at Michigan State University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
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