Marriage builds wealth

According to Marriage Brings Wealth, Divorce Steals It by LiveScience Staff a 2006 study confirms what any divorced person probably suspected: Scrapping a marriage robs you of wealth. But the misfortune is more severe than merely divvying up the goods. The study of about 9,000 people found divorce reduces a person's wealth by 77 percent compared to that of a single person.

"Divorce causes a decrease in wealth that is larger than just splitting a couple's assets in half," said Jay Zagorsky of Ohio State University.

Likewise, getting married makes people richer by more than just adding their assets together.

• Each married person, on average, sees his or her wealth nearly double.
• Married people increased their wealth about 4 percent per year just as a result of being married, with other factors removed from the equation.

"If you really want to increase your wealth, get married and stay married," Zagorsky said. "On the other hand, divorce can devastate your wealth." The study relied on surveys of a group of people between 1985 and 2000. They were all between 21 and 28 years old in 1985. The findings are detailed in the current issue of the Journal of Sociology. After divorce, men had 2.5 times the wealth of women, but this seemingly large disparity worked out to only about $5,100, on average. For those who got divorced, wealth began to decline about four years before divorce and bottomed out the year prior to divorce.

Rise of the mindful consumer

Rajesh Setty's excellent Life Beyond Code blog brought to my attention this new book from Tim Sanders entitled Saving the World at Work: What Companies and Individuals Can Do to Go Beyond Making a Profit to Making a Difference.

Sanders, a former Chief Software Officer at Yahoo argues that what he calls a 'Responsibility Revolution' is underway. Both consumers and employers have turned away from price consciousness to demand that companies make a difference to society through their products, manufacturing methods, environmental efforts and community outreach.

According to the author, casual consumers now represent the minority; mindful consumers have brought in a new value system, paying as much attention to a company's environmental and social policies as to its pricing structures. Companies that do not clean up their acts will be left in the dust, losing customers who want their money to go toward good causes and employees who place more importance on green factors and job satisfaction than pay scale.

Through success stories like Horst Rechelbacher, the brains behind the ecologically sound cosmetics company Aveda, and Lee Scott's greening of Wal-Mart in 2004, Sanders makes a compelling argument for the necessity for businesses to appeal to their customers' hearts as well as their wallets.

A customer review on Amazon's US website is worth reading in full. Here's a flavour:

"Sanders' use of the words "revolution" and "revolutionary" are not hyperbolic. He wants to help achieve what Clayton Christensen characterizes as "movements punctuated with disruptive innovations that either create new markets or reshape existing markets." These movements will change, radically, how companies do business.

"These disruptive movements occur in five phases and Sanders devotes a separate chapter to each: First, a major change of circumstances that dramatically impacts how we think about the business landscape, creating in Phase Two a new set of values prior to the arrival of the innovators in Phase Three; then, "as the new values reach a tipping point of mass popularity, the fourth, and most extreme, phase of a business revolution occurs: disruption.

"In Leading the Revolution, Gary Hamel describes it this way: 'First, the revolutionaries will take your markets and your customers. Next they'll take your best employees. Finally, they'll take your assets. The barbarians are no longer banging on the gates, they are eating off your best china.'

"During the final phase, what Sanders calls The New Order, companies develop proficiency in service to new markets, innovators become more sophisticated, and customers become more demanding. 'Eventually, surviving companies will satisfy the new market needs and the competition will then turn to who does it best.' The process of natural selection continues as new 'infectious revolutionaries' appear, disrupting the terms of engagement in what continues to be a Responsibility Revolution."

Start-ups: momentum and more

Insighful presentation by Jason Fried of 37Signals to the recent Web 2.0 Expo conference. Here's a sample:

Momentum - It has as its hands in just about everything and is incredibly important. Especially for morale. Most typical projects are really exciting at the beginning and then people tend to lose interest and fade out. Long projects eat at you and you’re not even looking to do good stuff you just want to finish things and they don’t turn out well. Create a situation where projects are short and there’s excitement and it’s a short 2 week project and it leaves people in excited mode. Break big projects into as many small projects. 2 week rule.

Here's another quote:

Planning is Vastly Overrated - 37signals doesn’t do road maps, specs, projections. They have rough ideas internally but these aren’t shared externally. Even internally they’re not set in stone or written down. Think about what’s being done now and maybe what’s next. You set expectations too soon and things changed. Don’t want to be boxed into decisions you made 18 years ago. They don’t do design docs and functional specs ‘artifacts’ that don’t push back enough. A spec doc contains 1000 yes’es. Leads to an illusion of agreement. Everyone can read the same paragraph and think you agree. Don’t do projections like financial projections.

And a third one:

Follow the Chefs - Lagasse, Batali, Flay, Child, Oliver. What they do is they out teach, out share, and out contribute their competitors. They’re out there saying “hey look, I’m a chef, I’m going to give you all my secrets, here they are.” Not afraid to put their ideas out there and let people learn from them. Not afraid that people will take their ideas and build a restaurant right beside of them. Think about “what’s your cookbook?” For 37signals it was all about “Getting Real”. In the business world people ask “why would you want to give this away, won’t your competitors use it?” Give the idea away and get the message out. Company is lucky if it has customers, very lucky if it has fans, incredibly lucky if it has an audience that comes back to hear what you have to say every day.

Read the full presentation here.