Damon Vickers: The Day After the Dollar Crashes: A Survival Guide for the Rise of the New World Order

Over a year ago, on CNBC, the author proclaimed that the U.S. dollar would be "utterly destroyed." From CNBC.com: The dollar will get "utterly destroyed" and become "virtually worthless", said Damon Vickers, chief investment officer of Nine Points Capital Partners."We don't have resources. Neither does a lot of Asia to be quite frank," Vickers said on CNBC's Asia Squawk Box. "Countries that have resources -- the Brazils, the Canadas, Australia -- their currencies are doing well." Vickers noted that their stock markets have done the best year-to-date. "They have stuff. They've got resources. They export real things. The United States exports 'promises' and 'pretty paper'," he added. Read the full story, here. See also: The Collapse of the Dollar and How to Profit from It: Make a Fortune by Investing in Gold and Other Hard Assets.

Jeffrey Pfeffer and Power

Jeffrey Pfeffer is the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. This business school's magazine summed Pfeffer's thesis in an introduction of an article about the book and its topics: "Through three decades of teaching and writing about power, Jeffrey Pfeffer has emphasized a pithy but potent concept: Politics often trumps performance." See that article here. NPR's Forum (a KQED affiliate program) plugged the book. You can find the podcast of that show, here. The Harvard Business Review keeps a blog called "The Conversation," where Pfeffer posted an entry called, "Women and the Uneasy Embrace of Power." In the article, he writes that:

The evidence shows that women are less power-oriented than men. Women have more negative attitudes toward holding power, they are less likely to pursue power-based influence strategies, they are more bothered by and disfavor hierarchical relationships, they are less motivated to dominate others, and they are less likely to take actions to attain power. Moreover, in situations such as salary negotiations, studies show that women often believe that they deserve less than similarly qualified men and are, as a consequence, likely to demand less and to press their salary demands with less vigor.

See that HBR blog post here.

"To give or not to give: It's all about the brain" from APM's Marketplace

JONAH LEHRER: The first thing to note about giving away money is that it feels really good. For instance, several brain scanning experiments demonstrate that donating to a worthy cause leads to activation in the dopamine reward pathway. It's the same part of the brain that's turned on when we have sex, or eat a slice of chocolate cake. In fact, there is typically more "reward-related" activity when we donate money than we receive an equivalent amount. Giving is literally better than getting, at least from the perspective of the brain. But this generosity comes with a catch. Yes, we have altruistic instincts. Still, these instincts come with some real blind spots. Consider the work of Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon. He told undergraduates about a starving child named Rokia -- she lived in a crumbling refugee camp in Africa. His students acted with impressive generosity. They saw her emaciated body and haunting brown eyes and they donated, on average, about $2.50 to Save the Children.

View the Marketplace webpage of the story, here. Download the podcast here. See also: Proust Was a Neuroscientist, Decisive Moment, the, Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average, (PROUST WAS A NEUROSCIENTIST)PROUST WAS A NEUROSCIENTIST BY LEHRER, JONAH[AUTHOR]Paperback{Proust Was a Neuroscientist} on 2008

The Starbucks Cup Dilemma from Fast Company by Anya Kamenetz

Starbucks introduced paper cups in 1984, when it had just seven stores, as part of its transition from an artisanal roaster to the world's biggest specialty-coffee chain. It has taken various steps over the years to mitigate the environmental impact of its packaging. In 1997 (1,270 stores), Starbucks introduced the recycled cardboard-brown hot-beverage sleeve to cut down on double cupping. It fought the FDA for more than two years to get approval for the first hot-beverage packaging featuring 10% postconsumer recycled content. That cup, introduced in 2006 (12,440 stores), won the National Recycling Coalition's annual award. In 2008 (16,680 stores), Starbucks switched its plastic cups from polyethylene (No. 1) to polypropylene (No. 5), which uses 45% less greenhouse gases. As the company has grown, its cup-disposal problem "got to be a bee in the bonnet of [CEO] Howard Schultz," says Senge, the MIT business professor whose management philosophy book, The Fifth Discipline, is a worldwide best seller that popularized the concepts "learning organization" and "systems thinking." Senge originally got to know Starbucks through his work with the Sustainable Food Lab, a global network of NGOs and companies that work on international supply-chain-management practices around products like fair-trade coffee and cocoa. "These are the best NGOs and the best people in business around sourcing and food systems," he says. "They regard Starbucks as being as good as anybody in coffee."

Read the full FC article here.