Albert T. Wong - 黃頌言

How to Calculate Your Net Worth
Your net worth can be a useful tool to measure your financial progress from year to year. Your net worth is essentially a grand total of all your assets minus your liabilities. There is no magic net worth number, but you should use your net worth to track your progress from year to year, and hopefully see it improve.

Calculating your net worth can be easy. It only requires some basic financial information regarding the things you own and the debt that you owe.

Good article on how to write a resume

How to Write a Resume - Mahalo

China’s iClone - Popular Science
For a further look at China’s cloning industry, launch the gallery here. And to bet on whether China’s iClone, the Meizu miniOne, will be released this year, see our new PPX IPO.

The little gadget was bootleg gold, a secret treasure I’d spent months tracking down. The miniOne looked just like Apple’s iPhone, down to the slick no-button interface. But it was more. It ran popular mobile software that the iPhone wouldn’t. It worked with nearly every worldwide cellphone carrier, not just AT&T, and not only in the U.S. It promised to cost half as much as the iPhone and be available to 10 times as many consumers. The miniOne’s first news teases—a forum posting, a few spy shots, a product announcement that vanished after a day—generated a frenzy of interest online. Was it real? When would it go on sale? And most intriguing, could it really be even better than the iPhone?

The Dark Side of Trust — HBS Working Knowledge
It has been well documented that strong trust between a buyer and supplier provides many advantages, such as increased productivity. But according to new research coauthored by HBS professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee, trusting relationships can also have a negative side that managers must take into account.

How Will Millennials Manage? — HBS Working Knowledge
Nothing seems to set off managers I talk with more than the topic of managing Gen Yers, otherwise known as “millennials,” those born beginning in the late 1970s. Here’s what they tell me:

They are generally bright, cheery, seemingly well-adjusted, and cooperative. They’ll pull an “all-nighter” for a good reason, but they won’t let that kind of thing intrude regularly on their personal lives. Their work styles are sometimes confounding. They need to work in a social environment, often one that would appear to some of us as chaotic. This means, however, that they are very good at working in teams. They are good at multi-tasking, understand how to employ technology productively, and as a result can often produce good work at what appears to be the last minute. They are focused on their own personal development. They want an accelerated path to success, often exaggerate the impact of their own contributions, are not willing “to pay the price,” and have little fear of authority. As a result, they are often not a good bet for long-term employment, because they are quite willing to seek other employment (or no employment) rather than remain in a job in which they are not growing. They want their managers to understand their needs and lay out career options. As the authors of a recent book, Managing the Generation Mix, put it, they demand “the immediate gratification of making an immediate impact by doing meaningful work immediately.” In short, they are high maintenance, high risk, and often high output employees.

I wish they had one for IT design.

Design Thursday: Proving Design Moves Markets
We know that great design fuels revenue and grows margins. But thus far, most companies — with the possible exception of pioneers like Procter & Gamble and Whirlpool—have been unable to prove it. The main reason is that it’s exceedingly difficult to untangle design’s contribution from all the other business drivers–engineering, manufacturing, distribution, marketing–that ultimately fuel a product’s performance in the marketplace.

There is, however, compelling evidence that in the aggregate, companies that excel in design kick some serious butt in the market that matters most to investors: the stock market. The data comes from the London-based Design Council, a publicly funded research organization that promotes the role of design in Britain. The Council reports that over a ten-year period, from 1995 to 2004, 61 “design-led” businesses outperformed the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 by more than 200%.

Marketing Tuesday: Study Confirms the Power of Brand Packaging
I recently wrote a piece entitled What a Packaging Makeover Can Do For Your Company — it got me thinking about the issue of branding: what exactly branding is, how branding and marketing interact, and just how important packaging is to the whole process of branding, or perhaps rebranding, one’s company, products or services.

In the course of my research I conversed with a number of industry experts about how heavily instrumental packaging is in the development and maintenance of a company’s brand. All seemed to unanimously agree that packaging is intrinsic to the success of a brand. “Packaging is the number one medium to communicate the brand. “You need to pay attention to this area in your branding strategy because it is the first thing someone sees, touches, and essentially buys. Packaging is often more than a medium — it can be part of the product,” stresses Laurent Hainaut, founder of design agency Raison Pure.

Leadership: What Are You Wearing?
There have been a couple of interesting articles lately in the Wall Street Journal on the topic of dress. One had to do how appropriate business clothing is defined differently in New York and Los Angeles and the other had to do with how Thomas Barrack, CEO of Colony Capital dresses when he’s in deal-making mode.

Choosing the right dress and adornment is a communication skill. If we’re smart, we can use our clothing choices to send important messages. Chief among them is that we fit in, we belong. According to the WSJ article, Mr. Barrack is meticulous when dressing. For example, he wears pocket squares in London but doesn’t wear overcoat in Paris, where men don’t wear them. In New York, he ties a scarf one way and in Italy, another so as not to be seen as an outsider. The article also mentions Donald Trump who tries to mirror what other people in a given situation are likely to be wearing. His aim seems to be to eliminate distractions.

Wired News - AP News
After exhaustively compiling a list of the 237 reasons why people have sex, researchers found that young men and women get intimate for mostly the same motivations. It’s more about lust in the body than a love connection in the heart.

College-aged men and women agree on their top reasons for having sex - they were attracted to the person, they wanted to experience physical pleasure and “it feels good,” according to a peer-reviewed study in the August edition of Archives of Sexual Behavior. Twenty of the top 25 reasons given for having sex were the same for men and women.

Expressing love and showing affection were in the top 10 for both men and women, but they did take a back seat to the clear No. 1: “I was attracted to the person.”

Americans’ Technolust Spending Is as Hot and Heavy as Ever
High tech gear gets cheaper every year. So we’re spending a lot less on it, right? Um, no. In fact, the proportion of US household budgets spent on tech products and services — computers, game consoles, cell phone service, cable, TVs — has held steady at about 5 percent for most of the past decade. We’re just spending that money — more than we pay for health insurance — on different stuff.