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Friday, August 20, 2010

Back-To-School Tips: Embracing and Practising Diversity

Newswise — Successfully navigating in a diverse community and getting the most out of your education to prepare for the world of work should be students' primary goals, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or ability. Here's how students can accomplish this, according to Ryerson University experts.

1. Know yourself - conduct a SWOT analysis- Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats - on yourself. Be honest. What are you good at? What do you need to improve? Leverage your strengths and work on your weaknesses. Grasp opportunities and mitigate threats.

2. Respect other perspectives - it allows for a healthy exchange of ideas - new and better ideas. Celebrate the differences - start by exploring new communities, foods and customs. Walk a mile in the shoes of someone who is different from you.

3. Be inclusive - each of us is different and we contribute differently. By working together we complement each other’s strengths. Include people of different backgrounds in your group.

4. Network, network, network - make friends with many different people in class, in school, and in all your external activities. Extend a helping hand to others and don’t hesitate to ask for help when you need it.

5. Display excellence in everything you do - whether it’s course work or volunteering with student associations. Don’t be afraid to display your accomplishments. And give credit where credit is due.

6. Set specific but stretch goals - push yourself to reach higher. Do not let the fear of the unknown hold you back. If you find something new and don’t know much about it, start a discussion. You’ll be amazed at what information you can gather.

7. Get out of your comfort zone - progress, innovation, and creativity happen when you are willing to stretch. Make it work for you. Talk to several people and ask for their opinion. It will help you get an all round perspective.

8. Find a mentor, be a mentor - mentors help us navigate paths and help open doors.

9. Give back when you can - mentor someone. Help others and practice your leadership skills. It’s good to ask what you can do for others and not just what someone could do for you. You will find it very rewarding.

10. Speak up - when someone acts in a disrespectful manner towards you or towards others.

Source: Ryerson University
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Experts available for interviews:
Dr. Wendy Cukier, MA, MBA, PhD, DU (HC), LLD (HC), MSC

Associate Dean, Ted Rogers School of Management
Privacy and Cyber Crime Institute
Dr. Margaret Yap, MIR, PhD

Assistant Professor, Human Resources
Director, Diversity Institute

Long-term debt: The real problem

America's Debt Crisis

By Jeanne Sahadi, senior writerAugust 19, 2010: 7:51 AM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Starting next month, lawmakers will argue until they are hoarse over what to do about various spending bills and the Dec. 31 expiration of the Bush tax cuts.
But make no mistake: The fevered debates will take place in a vacuum.

That's because lawmakers have yet to seriously address how to rein in the country's long-term debt. And that broader debate will involve significant policy changes: A likely overhaul of the federal tax code and a reduction in spending across the board.

Policymakers have been mostly mum on the issue. By December, however, they will have a harder time ignoring the matter, since they will have in hand reports from the Bipartisan Policy Center's Debt Reduction Task Force and President Obama's fiscal reform commission.

Both panels will starkly lay out the magnitude of changes needed to correct for two unpleasant realities.

The first is a combination of habit and circumstance.

For years, the country was spending more than it was willing to pay in taxes, and then it was hit by a gob-smacking economic and financial crisis that spurred a lot more spending to stem the pain of the downturn.

The second reality, however, is more worrisome to budget experts. Even after the economy recovers, the gap between money out and money in will persist largely because of long-anticipated demographic changes such as the aging of the population. And borrowing to fill that gap could become much more expensive than it has been.

Deficit hawks: A dangerous trajectory

This year, U.S. debt held by the public, which does not include money owed to Social Security and other government trust funds, will top 60% of the country's economy as measured by gross domestic product. By 2022 it is projected to reach 100%. And by 2035, it's on track to approach 200%.

By comparison, the average debt held by the public between 1960 and 2000 was just 37%, according to information from the debt reduction task force.

The large leaps in indebtedness mean, among other things, that by the end of this decade, the vast majority of all federal tax revenue will be swallowed up by just four things: Interest payments on the country's debt, and the payment of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits.

By 2021, the cost of annual interest payments alone would top that of the defense budget and itself eat up more than half of all federal taxes, according to information from the debt reduction task force.

On tap: The call for sacrifice

Getting the federal ledger on a more stable track means that future legislative dogfights won't be about what breaks to offer voters so much as what sacrifices to ask of them.

"If we have not asked Americans to sacrifice, we have failed," said former Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., who co-chairs the debt reduction task force with Alice Rivlin, the former White House budget director under President Clinton.

"And if we have asked you to sacrifice and you choose not to do it, we've failed again because we haven't convinced you that this is one of the few ordeals facing America that is as bad as being in a war," added Domenici, who used to head the Senate Budget Committee.

The task force, and the president's commission, have said that the entire federal balance sheet is on the table. And they're both likely to recommend spending freezes, a serious curtailment of many tax breaks and various reforms to entitlement programs, to name just a few.

Still, neither Domenici nor Rivlin believes the effort to deal with the country's long-term debt will be all spinach and no sugar.

"In every major problem that a great country like ours has, there is a silver lining," Domenici said. His group, for instance, will propose ways to simplify the federal tax code, which both parties have wanted to do for a long time.

Whether Congress chooses to adopt either group's suggestions is impossible to say. Many deficit hawks believe it will take nothing short of a crisis for Congress to act. A crisis such as the fall of the dollar, loss of confidence in U.S. ability to pay what it owes, rampant inflation, or a sovereign rating downgrade.

Rivlin is more optimistic.

"My hope is that after the [mid-term] election, both parties will see the advantage of working together to get part of this problem behind them," she said. "I believe people are sensible enough to come to grips with this problem long before we're facing a downgrade of U.S. debt."

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Related articles:
U.S. debt: When is it safe to start cutting?
America's hidden debt

Entrepreneurs As The New Asset Class

Forget about technology, market size and products. VCs should invest in the entrepreneur.

As a reputed hacker and a serial entrepreneur, Rich Skrenta personifies the kind of person that I love to invest in. He is by most accounts a prodigy--his technical prowess showcased to the world while still in the ninth grade. Early successes in his career include NewHoo (subsequently the Netscape Open Directory) and Topix. Our paths crossed while Rich was still at Topix, and it was instantly clear that his future was infinitely bright. I jumped at the chance to invest when he started Blekko, but the reality is I'm just as excited about what tomorrow will bring.

Enter my new lens on investing: Entrepreneur equity. Specifically, equity in all the commercially productive activities of a person's career. I want to invest in the innate drive, talent and potential of a person. I want to invest in what they're working on now, what they're thinking about next, and whatever they dream up in the future. When it comes to exceptional talent, I've stopped worrying about technology, market sizes, product-market fit, etc. I just want to invest before the valuation gets frothy (seed is so 2010).

In case you're wondering, no, I'm not a feudal overlord. I'm not talking about payday loans and cement boots. In fact, what I'm talking about is not a new idea at all. The concept of making long-term investments on a person's complete body of work has analogues in many industries. Bowie Bonds (and the further music-backed securities that followed) in 1997 were an example of what can happen when you securitize the intellectual output and associated property rights that span the career of an artist (starting notably with David Bowie and much of his work).

I want a cross between Bowie Bonds and the MacArthur "Genius Award," the $500,000 grant given by the MacArthur Foundation to exceptional people to work on projects of their choosing. Perhaps a more recent analogue is the social venture Enzi, which is like Kiva for education. They're finishing up pilots at Stanford University to allow peer-to-peer investments in Stanford international students with financial need. Help pay their tuition and you get a share of their income streams for a fixed period in their future. The first batch of these students has already graduated and is now entering the productive period of the cycle.

Let's take a test case--Jim Everingham. He was the technical cofounder of LiveOps, and most recently the founder of image monetization platform Pixazza. Both are portfolio companies and repeat bets on people, notably ex-Netscape veterans, Everingham and his team (including hacker-ninja Lloyd Tabb). To date, my firm has had to make multiple discrete investments in both entities, but the reality is those investments were just a proxy for following the career of a prolific talent. If there had been a mechanism to invest directly in Jim (and others in the nexus), I'd be the first to do it and posit that it would be a more accurate reflection of our actual investing behavior.

Venture capitalists, today more than ever, need to be talent scouts. In "Why Entrepreneurs Don't Need VCs," I outlined the reasons why the current landscape has fundamentally altered the role of venture capital, and as embryonic investors we have to think in terms of people, not companies. It's well established that most start-ups pivot multiple times, and the idea we invest in is rarely what the company ultimately does.