#mini golf is a good example. they tend to be up there in terms of easily available themed attractions

[storytell]

@mckiingbiird​ asked

Talk about Twain? ^^

congratulations! i have SO much to say about twain! this is going to provide the longest answer possible out of any muse you could have picked just because twain has so little in canon and i’ve developed him so much. he’s my longest standing muse ever so there is too much about my portrayal to say without somewhat of an organization so i am right now without warning implementing a new feature into these ramble asks known as Sections. so now that i’m a little more coherent. sections.

just so you know by the way i really am not joking when i say this is over 10 paragraphs long. read at your own risk. however long you think this post is i can guarantee you it is longer.

this was for a meme i did but i literally can’t answer any more of these because i’m too ashamed by how little i have for every other muse in comparison to twain.

part I: timeline.

my twain was born just after the end of (or during the final days of) the war everyone’s always talking about in canon, and it genuinely didn’t have much of a direct impact on his life. he has six siblings (five older, one younger), and of those six there were three siblings he was closest with: orion, henry, and pleasant. orion and henry were the two oldest, and given that their dad was terribly abusive and their mom was, in twain’s own words, a coward, they did most of the work to provide for the family. although twain always thought orion and henry were mean, because they always played tricks on him. pleasant was twain’s confidant; she was the older sister he could go to if he needed something to cry about.

growing up, twain was always a troublemaking kid, and there were only so many schools in or around their town that he could get expelled from before there weren’t really many options left. in the summer before he was scheduled to go to his last year of middle school, this--among a variety of things such as the abuse of his father and a general feeling of wanting to run away--caused him to formulate a plan where he would run from home, which he did shortly before school started at the age of 13. i know i have the age he ran away listed as 14, but he tends to lie and say he actually ran away a year later.

he traveled for around a year on his own, meeting a lot of different people from a lot of walks of life, before meeting a man he would come to refer to as “uncle”, possibly under the instruction of that man. i should note that my personal hc for the identity of “uncle” is natsume souseki, but this doesn’t really have any bearing on much of anything and i tend to not mention it at all in threads where “uncle” comes up because it’s not the most significant thing. anyway, “uncle” taught him how to do many things to survive on his own, including shooting guns without his ability, making fires, cooking food over an open flame, etc. he was the first real father figure twain ever had, but he and twain eventually parted ways when twain had just turned 17.

twain did a bit of freelance work afterwards--initially he sang and played guitar on the streets for pocket change, but after he killed a man trying to kidnap a girl he didn’t know, something within him clicked: he knew he wouldn’t mind doing something like this for a living, after his initial bout of panic. his career as a freelance hitman was very short-lived, but it got him enough money that for the few hits he did, he was able to stay at nice hotels and do fun things. he never really used any of it, though, too used to not having any money at all and attached to the lifestyle of not having a home to come back to. the first time he ever splurged on himself wasn’t even anything fancy; it was an olive garden.

to the man who sat himself down at the table and bought one of every food item, the place was probably less than nothing. but to twain, so used to being poor and never having enough, it seemed like more than he could have ever asked for. and so, after very little negotiation, began twain’s contract with the guild. at the time, not-yet-eighteen year old twain was the youngest member of the guild’s ranks, but he was definitely not the least talented. he rose quickly through the ranks of the organization, becoming the chief gunman/sharpshooter and a fellowcraft of the guild after just over a year of being employed.

from there, things are probably predictable, given everything that twain is. he makes friends in the guild, begins spending the ludicrous amount of money he’s being paid for his services, and generally does what’s fun for him. he discovers a love for minecraft (more on that later) and rollercoasters, and goes on travels he never would have been able to without the security of the money he’s being paid. then, after a few years of relative normalcy, the guild goes to yokohama, and you know what happens from there.

post-canon is where things begin to get a little bit foggy for me. i do technically HAVE a mainverse idea for what happens to him, but the catch is that i almost never use it. for post-canon stuff, i tend to use one of any number of verses where he’s stayed or been caught up in yokohama, because it’s just a lot easier. but my actual mainverse headcanon unaffected by roleplay relationships i want to have is this: twain goes back to america. he unintentionally gathers a bunch of lost kids and, using his travel money, he provides for them while they all travel. and that’s it. maybe in the future he becomes successful from the tales in his success diary. maybe not. who knows?

part II: traits with basis in canon.

i don’t need to repeat that we see very little of twain, but i just did anyway. because we get very few glimpses of him, there’s not much we know outside of shallow character traits. because it’ll make things easier to talk about, here are the core traits i noticed in twain that i’ve had to build off of, and then different paragraphs talking about how i’ve built off of them.

we rarely see him anything but energetic, but he does have his quiet moments.

he’s very friendly, and tends to invite people out to do fun things with him.

he is very competitive, but NOT a sore loser.

he does things to impress others. notably, one of his canon likes is “praise”.

he’s very self-confident, but not to the point where he thinks it’s impossible to beat him, as demonstrated when he’s not angry about atsushi’s victory.

he’s very flippant about taking a life.

following orders is not his top priority.

we rarely see him anything but energetic, but he does have his quiet moments. a couple of my headcanons have stemmed from this--the first is the most obvious one and that is that twain has ADHD. this didn’t come directly from his energetic attitude and rather from a combination of multiple traits, but it also happened because i was projecting. the other headcanon that’s stemmed from this combination of facts is that twain is smarter and more introspective than most people give him credit for. this has backing in the scene where he shoots at atsushi from the moby dick; instead of shooting at atsushi, he diverts his aim to the oil truck in front of him.

he’s very friendly, and tends to invite people out to do fun things with him. there are a lot of things i can talk about in this regard, but i’ll start here: twain genuinely likes to meet and make friends with new people. despite his occupation, he loves hearing others’ stories and tends to ask them about them. along with this and somewhat in tandem with the introspective part of the first hc, twain also pays a lot more attention to how people act and what they like than everyone tends to think he does. this actually has basis in my dive into the real life author mark twain, as he was notably famous for being able to pick up on people’s mannerisms, accents, and ideologies well enough to flawlessly represent them on paper (he claimed he could “read human character as well as he could read the mississippi river “).

he is very competitive, but NOT a sore loser. from this trait, i’ve sort of developed the idea that it’s very rare for twain to actually get angry, and he tends not to argue with people. he’s very quick to forgive if he knows he was in the wrong and tends to say sorry first after arguments, but at the same time, if he knows he’s right and shouldn’t be the one apologizing, he’ll cling onto that until the day he dies. also, this has spawned the smaller and less significant hc that twain likes to do competitive activities like laser tag or mini golf for fun, especially since you don’t necessarily have to know the people you’re doing those things with.

he does things to impress others. notably, one of his canon likes is “praise”. there’s not really much to say here in terms of how i’ve built on this, but one notable thing is that i attribute this trait to the lack of praise he got from his parents growing up, and how lonely he felt even when he was traveling with “uncle”. he likes when people are impressed by him because he’s impressed by himself, and when he doesn’t get the reaction he expected it puts a little bit of a damper on his confidence. temporarily.

he’s very self-confident, but not to the point where he thinks it’s impossible to beat him, as demonstrated when he’s not angry about atsushi’s victory. speaking of confidence, i actually have a whole journey laid out about twain’s journey with arrogance v. confidence and the overabundance of arrogance to make up for a lack of confidence in his earlier years. when he first ran away, he had a very troubled and hateful mindset, and outwardly portrayed that he believed himself to be the best of the best while really thinking he was terrible and a burden to his family. it was only through meeting so many people and the guidance of “uncle” in his more formative years that he began to develop a genuine sense of self confidence and, by the time he hits 20, everything good he says about himself is genuinely true. this said, he is also very aware of his flaws (for example, he definitely knows he isn’t too smart or careful or focused), but he doesn’t view them as detriments to his character and instead chooses to believe that without his flaws, he wouldn’t be himself.

he’s very flippant about taking a life. this trait actually was what caused me to think about how he took his first life. i’ll walk you a little through the things he felt when he did: he was angry, at first, then terrified, then secretly glad, and then sooner rather than later he genuinely felt nothing about it. as he’d go on to carry out hits for various people and the guild, that feeling of initial panic would become smaller and smaller every time, until the lives of the people he had to kill didn’t really matter to him. that said, it’s important to me that he still values connection and friendship with other people, so he definitely does. i believe these two traits can coexist when done properly; he values the lives of people and the stories they have to tell, but all life ends someday anyway and nothing is lost by the end of that life sooner than it would have ended otherwise.

following orders is not his top priority. this is, i think, where i get the idea that twain is a free spirit. it is this that has sort of shaped twain in every way, whether it’s getting expelled from every school in his area or going overboard on a mission where his target should have been left alive. i think his top priorities are having fun and having a good story to tell later, and while letting atsushi die wouldn’t have fallen under something fun, twain’s anticipated victory definitely would have been a good story to tell others.

part III: traits with basis in how mark twain was in real life.

an unashamed love of cats. it doesn’t come up SUPER often, but i like to remind people from time to time that my twain absolutely adores any and all cats, and had plenty of them himself before the guild arc. this comes from rl mark twain being obsessed with cats to the point where he’d have up to 19 cats at once, and would straight up rent cats while he was traveling so he never had to be without cats.

traveling. speaking of traveling! this not only comes from rl twain’s travels, but also the love for adventure displayed by huck and tom in their books. bsd twain really wouldn’t be a good adaptation of the soul of mark twain without acknowledging his travels. i think there were hints to this in the show, but definitely not as much as i would have liked. my twain is a restless soul and not only likes seeing new placed, but meeting new people.

unashamed acceptance. this actually stems both from the central ideas of several of twain’s novels as well as a quote and his love of traveling. my twain used to be a terrible person; he came from a conservative family and had no internet access beyond the one TV that they had, so it’s not like he was very informed. it was traveling and meeting so many people that caused him to develop the accepting nature he has today.

utter devotion to objects of his affection. i’m assuming because everyone reading this is probably a normal person, they DON’T know the intimate details of twain’s relationship to his wife. well i personally do. while there were undoubtedly some problems between them, there is one thing i choose to input in my relationships involving twain: he genuinely bent over backwards to get her to love him. he would do literally anything for her. and that’s a huge big part of how i portray twain in all of his relationships because i input that aspect of “willing to do anything for his partner, even if it wasn’t what he might have wanted to do beforehand, just so he can be happy with them”.

profanity and sex. i don’t know how much you know about twain’s other works that aren’t his most popular, but he was known for being very prolific and obscene in certain works, to the point where he made a joke about the word ‘damn’ being in used in substitution of the word ‘very’. for his time, he was also very obscene and made a lot of references to not only sex but other things that were considered taboo subjects among the respectable like, i kid you not, farting. because of this, my twain curses a LOT. and i can’t exactly explore this much since i myself am a minor and don’t know how far i can really go, but he is very in tune with sexuality and basically this man has a lot of sex.

comedy. to put things plain and simple, RL mark twain was basically a touring standup comedian for a good portion of his life. i attribute this fact to why twain is the funniest person in the guild and always tries to keep things light and fun. 

bouts of depression. i should say this now: my twain doesn’t have depression. but, since i didn’t want to ignore the fact that the real author more than likely DID, i felt i should include my twain’s suicide attempts just before and just after leaving home, when he felt he was at his lowest.

the river. the river not only serves as a motif for twain’s most famous story, but also his actual life. if you know anything about rl mark twain, you know he was a steamboat captain for a little while. my twain definitely was not (although i have thought about giving him a steamboat captain au just for fun), but nevertheless a large portion of his initial journey away from his home took place on a river, to parallel both huckleberry finn and his actual life.

thoughts on war and humanity. since i don’t write serious things with twain a lot, it’s difficult to incorporate this into most threads with him. rl mark twain was personally affected by the civil war and did all he could to avoid fighting. he never actually enjoyed conflict. my twain was NOT affected by the war, as it was just ending when he was born, however he still has a lot of thoughts on militarization that i won’t elaborate on as i’m trying my best to keep this blog free from subjects that could genuinely affect anyone’s wellbeing. as for humanity, my twain largely shares his counterpart’s view that human beings can be very greedy and selfish, but that kindness is the greatest weapon and gift one can have. his views are very complicated so it would definitely not hurt to ask him directly about them wink wink nudge nudge.

confidence and natural magnetism. i’ve already spoken about my twain in regards to confidence, but there is some of it that is based in how mark twain in real life was--and no doubt in how tom sawyer acts in every book that features him. he was once quoted as calling himself THE american. despite all this, however, i take from rl twain his natural magnetism and ability to somehow make people like speaking to him despite that he should very much come off as arrogant; with my twain, there’s really just something about him that feels as though he wants to get to know you.

curiosity about science and new technology. because of his counterpart’s interest in science and friendship with nikola tesla, my twain has a deep love for new and exciting technology, and it’s actually because of this that i have the hc that he discovered a love for video games after having enough money to actually purchase a setup to play them. he’s really interested in things like cloning and genetic altering even if he doesn’t really understand the actual science behind them and i’m very confident that if he had watched phineas and ferb his favorite character would be dr. doof.

part IV: miscellaneous.

favorite color: orange. not only is it the color of his hair, but it’s also the color of fire and a very bright and friendly color. favorite food: italian, but he’s not a picky eater and will settle for anything. he specifically enjoys good NY style pizza, but doesn’t think chicago style pizza is bad either. favorite song: american pie by don mclean. “uncle” introduced him to it. favorite movie: it honestly depends on the day. recently he’s had a strange obsession with night at the museum. favorite game: minecraft. this is the part where i explain later: it was the first game he actually played after buying himself a good enough computer to play games and he fell deeply in love with how beautiful of a game it was. he gets very emotional about the idea that for him, minecraft is a game meant to be shared with other people and for you to showcase just what you can do. he has a hardcore world that’s been up since he was 18! favorite non-alcoholic drink: lemonade. favorite alcoholic drink: whiskey. favorite season: summer, with fall as a close second. favorite holiday: halloween. he loves to dress up. this year he says he plans to dress up as the cowboy from night at the museum, but that will probably change. favorite musical: currently, newsies. but he’s also been known to like falsettos, bonnie and clyde, and 35mm. favorite place: anywhere there’s something new to see. favorite animal: coyotes! biggest fear: as strange as it may seem, he genuinely actually doesn’t have any real fears. the only thing he’s afraid of is the kool aid man because his brothers convinced him that it was filled with the blood of kids who didn’t like kool aid and he’s never been able to shake that fear from him.

MBTI type: enfp. enneagram type: 7w6. hogwarts house: gryffindor. i actually have had thoughts before about putting him in hufflepuff or slytherin, but his unashamed bravery and willingness to run headfirst into any situation with no fears as well as his BLATANT disregard for rules makes him more of a gryffindor than anything. ilvermorny house: thunderbird. it favors adventurers, and i’m sure if you’ve gotten this far you know twain loves to adventure. patronus: honestly, probably some kind of hawk or falcon. tma entity: hard to say, but i tend to have him aligned with either the eye or the vast. the eye because he likes to watch and observe and hear others’ stories, and it’s a great way to play off of twain looking through a scope to snipe people in canon. and the vast because he’s a thrill seeker and loves the feeling of falling, and also believes that in the grand scheme of things not much is very important. PJO godly parent: hermes for sure, but i have experimented with the idea of it being apollo, dionysus, or athena. hunger games district: 7. i already have this established in the hunger games au for him that i?? just kinda have for some reason. divergent faction: dauntless. i don’t even like divergent by the way, i was just kind of trying to think of other categories i would sort twain in. i think he’d definitely be divergent tho tbh.

[talabib]

How To Be More Adaptable In Life & Business

What do Allied defense departments battling Nazi Germany in the Second World War, the creators of the iconic Mini Cooper and Starbucks have in common? In a word, adaptability – the ability to change with the times and piggyback on technological and social changes to achieve success.

Adaptability is a skill that’s becoming indispensable in today’s frenetic world of business. Markets and consumer tastes are fickle, and nothing is as likely to land you in hot water as complacency.

In this post, we’ll analyze adaptability in action everywhere from a small Italian village battling post-financial crisis austerity measures, to the boardroom of a multinational coffee chain and the post-war British car industry.

Life is unpredictable even for the successful, which is why adaptability is so important.

In 2009, American golf star Tiger Woods’s position in the sport’s global rankings took a nosedive. By 2011 he’d slipped from number one to 58th place. It was an odd sight, especially since Woods had been known for his incredible consistency since bursting onto the scene in 1996. So what went wrong?

Well, it was a sign of the golfing god’s mortality. Life is unpredictable, and even the most successful people can’t always dodge the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. It turned out that Woods’s on-field performance problems had roots in his personal life.

In 2009, the media ran a story about him crashing his car outside his house. Neighbors told reporters they’d seen his wife chasing after him with a golf club in her hands. Rumors of substance abuse and infidelity began circulating and major sponsors including Gatorade and Gillette dropped their formerly prized sponsee.

Woods didn’t let any of that get to him, however. In fact, he demonstrated just how important adaptability is when you’re faced with setbacks. He continued working hard, even as his stats slipped, and learned how to deal with the media pressure he was under. His perseverance paid off. By March 2013, he was back at the top of world golf rankings.

That makes Woods a poster boy for what experts calls, “High adaptability, high achievement people,” or HAHAs for short. That’s a pretty fitting acronym: HAHAs are people who can laugh in the face of adversity and, over time, claw their way back to the top.

What sets them apart is their ability to focus on solutions rather than problems. They look on the bright side of life even as things seem to be falling apart around them, and they remain determined to achieve their goals. They’re also typically unafraid to ask for help and reach out to people who can support them in their struggle to reassert themselves.

Now that we’ve seen what adaptability looks like in practice, let’s take a look at how it works in business contexts.

Only companies that have perfected the art of adaptability will truly succeed.

At the height of the 2008 financial crisis, the US government offered to bail out car manufacturing giant Ford. Despite being up to its eyeballs in debt and looking like it might go under any day, the company ultimately turned down the proposal.

There was a good reason for this refusal. Chairman Bill Ford was convinced that companies that fail to adapt fail, period. Sure, an injection of government cash might have solved Ford’s short-term liquidity issues, but it wouldn’t have gotten to the root of the problem – its longstanding failure to adapt to the new realities of the automobile market.

The company’s board of directors and its managers decided on an alternative strategy and hatched a plan they called “The Way Forward.” At the heart of this roadmap was a reappraisal of Ford’s relationship with the environment, an issue it had long sidestepped. If the carmaker wanted to remain relevant to American consumers, it would have to move toward their views on environmental matters.

What followed was a pretty radical overhaul. Ford downsized by around 25 percent and implemented a system to produce cars more quickly. Most importantly, it shifted to manufacturing smaller and more fuel-efficient cars.

The carmaker dodged a bullet, but the company almost left it too late. A better idea than waiting it out and hoping for the best would’ve been to take a leaf out of Toyota’s book. The Japanese corporation is a master at adapting to changing market conditions, a characteristic that allowed it to increase its share of the global car market from 7.3 percent in 1995 to 15 percent in 2005.

So what’s the secret of its success? Well, the company has a solid reputation for quality products, but what really sets it apart is its constant search for improvements that satisfy changing consumer preferences. This allowed the company to stay ahead of the curve and anticipate changes in the market long before competitors like Ford saw them coming.

To take just a couple of examples, Toyota was already developing low-emission cars in 1992 and hybrid petrol and electricity-powered vehicles in 1995!

Sometimes adaptability means swimming against the current, and that can help the environment.

In the summer of 2011, the Italian government was facing financial issues. Deciding to cut back on expenditures, it introduced a reform to incorporate villages with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants into larger administrative units headed by a single mayor. But one small village called Filettino resisted these measures. It understood that adaptability sometimes means swimming against the current.

As far as the villagers were concerned, reacting to new developments didn’t mean rushing into old reforms or embracing change for change’s sake. In their view, one way of adapting was to defend the status quo, and that’s precisely what the mayor of Filettino decided to do.

Defying the government, he declared the village’s independence and issued its own currency. It was called the fiorito, meaning ‘flowering’ in Italian – a reference to the settlement’s belief that it would continue to flourish. The village looked to the past for inspiration, harking back to the age before unification when Italy was ruled by many small city-states, kingdoms and principalities. In the end, its act of resistance preserved Filettino’s independence and sense of community.

Headstrong Italian villagers aren’t the only beneficiaries of swimming against the current, however. Bucking trends and following one’s own path has also helped a number of companies thrive.

Take Levi Strauss as an example. Manufacturing jeans is traditionally a resource-intensive operation. The finishing process alone requires around ten separate washes and gallons of water. If the jeans have a special pattern or a fade effect, that requirement increases even further. That was accepted as a given until the American firm decided to shake things up.

Rather than simply going along with the idea that the only thing that matters in business is generating profits, Levi Strauss began factoring environmental considerations into their calculations. Soon enough the company had figured out a way of finishing jeans without using any water at all. By using stones to soften the fabric and rinsing them with a special type of resin, the company cut its water consumption by an incredible 96 percent!

Adaptability is an innate part of the way the brain functions.

It was a regular day in New York in 1985 when Pedro Bach-y-Rita, a Spanish teacher who’d lived a happy and successful life in the city for many years, suddenly collapsed. He’d suffered a massive stroke and was left paralyzed. The doctors treating Bach-y-Rita claimed there was nothing they could do for him. But they were wrong.

What they had underestimated was how adaptable humans are. Both of Bach-y-Rita’s sons were in medical school when their father fell ill. Unhappy with his doctors’ diagnoses, they decided to physically re-educate him from scratch, as though he were a baby. The first task they set themselves was teaching him to crawl using kneepads and the support of a wall.

Once he’d mastered that, they began setting more difficult tasks like catching balls, which were designed to train his motor systems. Bach-y-Rita made remarkable progress under their supervision. He was soon sitting and, a little later, walking. Astonishingly, within a year he was back at work teaching Spanish at the City College of New York, where he remained until his retirement.

So how did Bach-y-Rita regain control over his basic motor functions despite the serious brain damage he’d suffered during his stroke? It comes down to the plasticity of the human brain. Essentially, the undamaged parts of his brain took control of the damaged areas.

Bach-y-Rita’s son Paul returned to medical school after helping his father. He later became one of the first scientists to verify the theory of neural plasticity – the idea that the human brain’s capacities and functions aren’t set in stone but can adapt and change.

In one experiment, Paul demonstrated that blindfolded participants were able to catch balls thanks to a head-mounted camera which relayed images to their brains through sensory receptors on their tongues. That’s a shining example of how different neural pathways and neurons in the brain can adapt and tackle new tasks, like interpreting images.

Effective adaptation means learning from mistakes and resisting the urge to go back to square one.

When people first fail at a task, they tend to lower their expectations and claim that at least they learned something from their mistakes. The crucial question, though, is what past failures teach us: Do we learn how to fail, or how to improve so we don’t fail again?

Adaptability is, in large part, the art of learning from mistakes – ideally, the mistakes of others! Take the British automobile industry. In the 1950s, virtually every carmaker was set on developing ever more powerful – and fuel-guzzling – vehicles. They were so fixated on this goal that they overlooked a massive segment of the market: young, urban and environmentally-minded people.

The advantage thus passed to German competitors who were churning out popular, compact microcars like the Messerschmitt KR200. As a result, British brands were being crowded out altogether. Did that make them change their approach? Hardly. There was, however, one notable exception: a small team of auto engineers at the British Motor Company headed by designer Sir Alec Issigonis.

Observing their peers’ stubborn refusal to change with the times, the team decided to spearhead the production of a new style of car – the iconic Mini marketed by Morris Mini-Minor. Learning from the mistakes of others and adapting to new consumer preferences quickly led to success. Over the following decades, the British Motor Company went on to sell over five million Minis.

That said, you can take learning from mistakes too far, as PepsiCo found out in 2009 when it developed a new brand image for Tropicana orange juice. When the company’s massive marketing campaign backfired and sales plummeted by 20 percent, PepsiCo panicked.

Realizing that the branding made the product look anonymous and cheap rather than promoting awareness of its quality, they scrambled back to square one. Instead of making a few minor tweaks and fixing the mistake, they reverted to the old branding. The upshot? They blew $33 million to change absolutely nothing!

Successful companies understand that experimentation is crucial to adaptability.

In 1940, Adolf Hitler ordered the shutdown of all weapons development research programs expected to take longer than six months to reach completion. It was a costly miscalculation for Germany. Why? Because experimentation is the cornerstone of effective adaptation.

The mistake would haunt Nazi Germany as the tide gradually turned against it in the Second World War. While German scientists were shackled to short-term targets, their Allied counterparts were given free rein to experiment with new weapon technologies for as long as they pleased. When defense scientist William Butement came up with an idea to develop a proximity fuse, for example, he was encouraged to delve deeper.

A proximity fuse is a useful piece of gadgetry if you’re in the middle of a shooting war. A bomb fitted with the fuse’s radar technology will only detonate when it’s sufficiently close to its targets. Older bomb types, on the other hand, used standard timers that often exploded long before – or after – they’d reached their targets. Needless to say, the bombs with the proximity fuses did the most damage.

Crafting the perfect proximity fuse took time and dedication, and it was only after years of experimentation with prototypes that the finished article was ready for deployment. It came just in the nick of time. In 1944, a German counteroffensive caught the Allies off guard and the outcome of the Battle of the Bulge hung in the balance. Lucky that they had the perfect weapon to beat back the onslaught: artillery units equipped with lethally accurate proximity fuse shells.

Experimentation also has its uses in the metaphorical war between businesses. Take Apple, a company that has long been synonymous with a culture of experimentation. When its new products meet a negative reception, it shelves them and gets to work on a superior alternative. You may or may not remember Apple’s first handheld computer – the clunky, error-prone Newton. The Newton crashed and burned and Apple responded by going back to the drawing board. The result? Its designers used the prototype to develop the iPod, iPhone and iPad.

Rushing to adapt can lead to a crash, and failing to think ahead isn’t any better.

Learning to drive is thrilling. The world suddenly becomes broader as exciting new possibilities come into focus. But you have to be careful. It’s easy to get carried away and put your foot down. That’s when things go wrong and you find yourself at risk.

The same thing happens to businesses when they push too hard: the wheels come off and they crash. Take Netflix. The company understood that the future of movie watching was streaming before any of its competitors, and it steamed ahead. What was the problem, then? It was too quick for its subscribers, who were still satisfied with the old offer which allowed them to rent DVDs and stream for $9.99 a month.

In 2011, Netflix decided to push its customers and split their offering into two separate components: rentals and streaming, now priced at $7.99 each – a pretty hefty price hike for people who wanted to continue using both services.

The decision didn’t go down well. Netflix hemorrhaged a million subscribers and the value of its shares fell by 25 percent. The service did eventually recover, of course, but if it hadn’t been so hasty it would have achieved its current success much sooner.

Failing to anticipate changes in the market is even more damaging, however, as Blockbuster found out. Founded in 1985, the movie rental business quickly grew over the following decades. By 2008, it had thousands of stores across the US. But despite its dominant position in the market, it was caught entirely unawares by the streaming revolution.

Even worse, it failed to launch its own streaming service while Netflix began establishing itself. That would have been simple enough – after all, Blockbuster held all the aces: it was a household name with a large customer base and plenty of capital.

But Blockbuster wasn’t nimble enough to adapt to new realities. It continued focusing on customer experience in its bricks-and-mortar stores even after a new CEO was hired in 2007. By 2010, the writing was on the wall. Blockbuster declared bankruptcy and was gobbled up by the American TV company Dish Network.

Radical leadership is often the only solution when companies lose sight of their goals.

It’s easy to look good when the economy’s booming and you’re backed by a reputation built up over decades. But success can breed complacency. The result of taking your eye off the ball? You lose sight of your goals.

Take Starbucks. Everything had been plain sailing for decades when it hit the rocks in 2007. The coffee chain’s chairman Howard Schultz had an idea about what had gone wrong: its dominant position had incubated an arrogant outlook and the company had stopped taking care of its customers.

He was right. Formerly loyal patrons weren’t happy and had started going elsewhere in search of their coffee fix. That same year, Starbucks closed over 900 stores and fired 1,000 of its employees. That was the end of the growth policy championed by the company’s CEO between 2002 and 2007, Jim Donald, who had become obsessed with opening more and more stores. The mad rush to expand had resulted in Starbucks losing touch with its founding values.

In the end, Starbucks scraped through this rough patch. So how did it turn things around? Well, it had a leader who was prepared to push through radical reforms: Howard Schultz. One of the first things he did after taking charge was to close 7,000 Starbucks stores in the US and give every barista extra training to help them up their coffee game. When a test revealed that McDonald’s had better-tasting coffee than Starbucks, Schultz introduced new roasting and grinding processes.

None of that was rocket science. Schultz simply understood that a coffee chain has to do two things to retain its customers’ loyalty: prepare a great cup of joe and offer a selection of delicious cakes and pastries. But sometimes it takes a radical visionary to do the commonsensical thing. By 2010, his policy had paid off. Starbucks had recovered and its revenue increased to $10.7 billion!

That just goes to show how important adaptability is when you’re struggling to get ahead or just treading water. While you shouldn’t rush change, it’s worth keeping an open mind, experimenting and seeing what incremental changes you can make to improve your situation.

Adaptability is all about looking ahead, reading the signs and using the prevailing winds to chart your course. Once you’ve mastered that art, you can plan ahead and avoid being caught off guard by sudden changes. That’s especially true in business. The most successful companies consistently demonstrate an ability to change with the times, experiment with new solutions and adapt themselves to customers’ changing desires and needs.

 Action plan: Believe in the impossible. What stops us adapting? Well, nothing throttles innovation like the belief that some things are simply impossible. Take it from American biologist George Church. He was convinced he could design a machine that could decode the entire human genome. Ignoring the naysayers, Church pressed ahead with his vision and constructed his device. While the procedure initially cost a staggering $3 billion, Church managed to reduce the price to just $5,000 over the years. Today, there’s a real chance that it might become affordable enough to be integrated into routine medical testing, opening up the possibility of all sorts of medical breakthroughs!

[lovelyfantasticfart]

Record Breaking Year For Better Toronto Real Estate Market

Trial consulting covers a number of areas such as mock trials, witness training, jury consulting, and jury selection and more. Variety of condos, family house and flats are being in-built main areas to absorb the population and meet the demand of dwelling protection. The senior unsecured score on Residence Belief was lowered to BB from BBB. Boland stated estimates on a sale price for Dwelling Capital could be speculative, however said industrial banks could be interested. Even you probably have already bought a commercial actual estate property, it is very important keep in mind that it's an extended process. What does this real estate market imply to a Buyer or Seller in Toronto? As both a resident and real estate agent working in Oshawa, I know first hand what a beautiful place this city is to reside and elevate a household. There are increasingly more actual property investors that see the large potential of the Toronto real estate market, comparable to any other large city on the earth, including New York.

Nonetheless there are a few suggestions for you, anyone should first know money of sleep that very good for someone. Also spread the word among buddies and family, as many individuals know somebody who knows someone who has a automobile they're trying to sell. Their state-of-the-art approach to creating property has undoubtedly attracted people who find themselves in search of inexpensive luxury. Do not forget to send a "thanks" word to everyone who submitted suggestions whether or not successful or not. Cover the seeds or plants within the holes with fresh soil and add some fertilizer in line with the manufacturer鈥檚 suggestions. As you'll be able to see, the whole space is now surrounded by the glass and steel towers of twenty-first century Toronto. Gregory, you forgot to say that prices in Toronto dropped 30% the final time that this kind of gross sales drop occurred. Analysts say 30 per cent to 50 per cent of sales in sure buildings were to such traders, with some already set to exit the market.

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6. SAVE for massive-ticket gadgets: Individuals love their mini-mansions, but most of them are completely unfurnished. Overview the web site of each personal harm lawyer you're considering and make sure the details are correct. Loft items are actually accessible on the market on the L-Tower for the first time. Now several words in regards to the style of the study paperwork. In the leasing sector, the GTA-large office vacancy rate solely increased barely in 2016, even with the completion of 11 new workplace buildings that added 3.2 million sq. ft of stock. Social media marketing allowed for even a mom and pop shop to compete online. Let me repeat: nearly half of all staff nearing retirement age will don't have anything but Social Security to rely on. The collection follows them simply out from the police academy where they will bonded collectively, fought collectively, drank collectively, labored together and rested together. Someone could discover info for busing on-line by looking up bus schedules for the city by which you reside in.

In addition to this benefit, Mississauga is situated in the direction of the west to the principle metropolis of Toronto, Canada. I'm hoping so as a result of that's the purpose of this text - to get you higher educated on actual property denver and other associated oregon real property, realestate listings, middle city philadelphia actual property, realtors and data. Teranet gives e-companies to the legal, actual property, government, financial and healthcare markets. The complete neighborhood options curvy roads, unique faculties, a golf membership and a handful of untold billion greenback mansions. It additionally provides a neat image of the breakdowns per area. They have a well-liked Fb web page on which they share pictures of superior homes and quotes to inspire and encourage their followers. However, this lacks the interpretive price that learners need to have so that you could far better be aware of the articles as they quite merely connect to the material. 鈥淥ver the long term, Vancouver and Toronto鈥檚 house costs have moved in tough lockstep. Many people undergo from acid reflux. In doing so, you'll be able to always take the assistance of an experienced mortgage broker. Blogs like these at all times tend to get famous later on. The master story teller was working on a sequel when he died from cancer in December 2010. He was 87. Dying silenced VE3 ERS, but not his life's stories.

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[tance]

Salt Lake City Contract Attorney

“Keep it secret. Keep it safe,” seems to have been the inspired motto of South Jordan City regarding a certain document that the public demanded access to. No, it wasn’t the One Ring to Rule Them All, it was a draft document for part of the finances of a mini golf and games business set to be developed in the city. And despite the best efforts in the courtroom, it looks like South Jordan City will be able to keep it secret and safe, after all, something which the Salt Lake City contract attorney for the “grass roots group trying to pry open the confidential ‘draft document’” says was not a great decision for the public, according to the Salt Lake Tribune article reporting on the story.

legal process to access information backfired and will result in more secretive measures

Here’s how it happened—starting back in 2011 when “Mitt Romney told an Iowa State fairgoer that ‘Corporations are people, my friend,’” setting off alarm bells for concerned citizen advocates across the country. But then the Supreme Court upheld that notion just recently with its decision that Hobby Lobby enjoys constitutionally protected rights. And now South Jordan City is invoking that same idea, defending its right to confidentiality regarding the planning document for Mulligans Golf and Games resort, which residents are hoping to block development for. Salt Lake City contract attorney would be hard pressed to dispute the legal reality that the city can claim personhood, and thus protection under confidentiality rules.

Which is what the Records Committee in Salt Lake City hearing the case decided, eventually, despite the best arguments presented by the grass-roots group’s Salt Lake City contract attorney Jon Call. Call actually acknowledged that the argument that the city is a person is a valid one, legally: “we don’t dispute that,” he was heard to say in the courtroom. But was South Jordan City taking it a little too far when it “pressed the city’s legal status as a ‘person’ to argue” that the draft report “was confidential because it was created for ‘personal use” of an individual—namely, South Jordan City”? Probably. An “individual” is apparently defined as a human being, even when a “person” is not.

So South Jordan City couldn’t claim “personal use” of the document, even while being recognized as a “person.” This is where things can get hairy, Salt Lake City contract attorney Alger and other lawyers in Utah would remark. But hairy or not, the dispute was resolved in a 4-1 vote favoring South Jordan City’s right to keep the document private and confidential. Secret and safe.

That’s probably not the end of the story, however. Local legal organizer Verne Cotton finds the idea of corporations and cities as people as “atrocious” and a “legal fiction” that is “allowing corporations to hide behind the Constitution.” His advocacy group points to “last year’s nonbinding survey in Salt Lake City where 88 percent of voters agreed” that corporations are not people, and they want to see the law changed. Which would mean significant changes for Hobby Lobby, and Wall Street too, most likely.

Free Consultation with a Contract Lawyer

When you need a contract drafted, have a contract dispute, or need a contract reviewed, call Ascent Law for your free consultation (801) 676-5506. We want to help you.

Ascent Law LLC8833 S. Redwood Road, Suite CWest Jordan, Utah 84088 United StatesTelephone: (801) 676-5506

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From http://www.ascentlawfirm.com/salt-lake-city-contract-attorney/

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[datingadviceonreddit]

For a long time, I didn’t know how to flirt at all. I knew flirting was important because it shows her that you’re romantically interested, but I just had no idea how to do it. It was embarrassing for me because I had assumed that knowing how to flirt was something that everyone was naturally able to do.Well, everyone except me that is.Eventually, I came up with my own way of flirting that’s authentic to my own introverted self. It’s gotten me dates and meaningful relationships naturally without making me feel sleazy or like a pickup-artist. If you’re like my past self and you have no idea what flirting is or how to do it, then I’m going to show you in detail how I personally flirt.Just in case you were too embarrassed to ask.The five styles of flirtingWhat comes to mind when people talk about flirting? Stuff such as winking, sideways glances, small touches, and double entendre.It’s true that these types of signals can be considered flirting. However, these only describe one kind of flirting. In his book The Five Flirting Styles: Use the Science of Flirting to Attract the Love You Really Want, Dr. Jeffrey Hall identified five different types of flirting:Playful: Flirting for fun without any expectations that it will lead to sex or a relationship.Physical: Flirting through body language and sexual communication.Polite: Flirting through proper manners and nonsexual communication.Sincere: Displaying sincere interest in the other person to develop an emotional connection.Traditional: Displaying interest through traditional courtship rituals and behaving in ways that are “gentlemanly” or “ladylike”.A lot of flirting advice is centered on the physical and playful styles of flirting. There’s a lot of readily available advice about how to approach women in bars and clubs, or what pickup lines to use, or how to get touchy-feely with someone you’ve just met. This kind of flirting style works well for people who are looking for short-term romance or just trying to have fun.However, this method of flirting felt inauthentic to me. I’m not a fan of using the bar and club scene to find romantic connections, and I don’t like flirting that’s too crude or dirty. When it comes to sex, I’m more interested in doing it with someone that I deeply care about.The way I flirt is a bit different.First contactIf there’s a woman that I’m interested in talking to, the first thing I do is to try and meet her eye. I watch her out of the corner of my eye and wait for her to glance in my general direction. When she does, I turn towards her and “accidentally” make eye contact while smiling. In an ideal world, I’d always be able to pull off the eye contact + smile before I try to talk to her because it helps warm up the first approach. However, sometimes it just doesn’t happen. Maybe she’s too absorbed in what she’s doing to make eye contact. If that happens, I still try to talk to her anyway and just do the best I can.By the way, if the two of us are at a social event such as a Meetup group or party then the eye contact + smile is not necessary. It’s socially acceptable to just go up to people you don’t know and introduce yourself at events such as these. Chances are she’s going to be glad you did! After all, it totally sucks when you go to a party or gathering and nobody tries to talk to you at all so you pull out your phone and pretend to be texting someone so that you don’t look lonely.I’ll walk over to her and open the conversation by simply saying “Hi”. That’s it. No need to try and find the perfect line or to be flashy. Just saying “Hi” is simple and authentic. After that, I try to continue the conversation by talking about something contextual. For example, if we’re at the library then I might ask her what she’s reading. At a Meetup group, I might ask her if she comes to that group a lot. At a party, I might ask her how she knows the host.From there, I pay attention to how she responds when I try to talk to her. If her responses are short and curt then she’s probably not interested. When that happens, I just wish her a good day and move on. However, if she tries to hold a conversation with me as well then that’s a good sign. In that case, I try to find something that she would be interested in telling me about herself. In the classic book How to Win Friends & Influence People, Dale Carnegie encourages talking in terms of the other person’s interests and listening to then with genuine interest. This is the sincere style of flirting.As the conversation begins to wind down, I lightly touch her on the arm and see how she reacts. If she pulls away or doesn’t react at all then she’s most likely not too interested in me. When this happens, I’ll simply end the conversation with something such as “It was nice meeting you” and then move on. Now, if she responds by smiling or moving a little closer when I touch her on the arm then that’s a good sign. In that case, I’ll try to ask her out by saying something like “Hey, I’ve had a really great time talking to you. I’m planning on going to [place] at [date + time]. Would you like to come with me?”On datesWhen I first start going out with a woman, my flirting styles tend to remain polite and sincere. For me, sexuality and emotions are closely tied together and I won’t do anything sexual unless I really feel emotionally comfortable around her. Even though sex on the third date seems to be the norm in today’s world, I don’t like to get sexual until I’ve known her for at least a few months.Instead, I simply try to get to know her better on those first several dates. What does she like to do? What are her hobbies? Her dreams? What do we have in common? I try to learn more about her as a person and I take her out on activities that have no sexual undertones, such as playing mini-golf or bowling or ice-skating.As I get to know her better, that’s when I start feeling emotionally ready to move towards more physical and playful flirting. I’ll initiate the first kiss after around seven or eight dates and, as we move from dating to being in a relationship, that’s when I start being more freely sexual.Finally, I try to mirror her flirting style as best I can without being inauthentic to myself. For example, even though I personally don’t initiate first kisses on first dates, if she’s the one who wants to kiss me then I’m not going to stop her. However, if she wants to have sex on the first date then I’ll turn her down. It’s inauthentic to my personality to sleep with her on the first date.There’s no wrong way to flirtThis is how I personally flirt. There’s no “right” or “wrong” way to flirt, and this just happens to be the way that I do it. My flirting style is primarily polite and sincere. I’m just a little playful in that I try to smile and wink at her with a few light arm touches, but otherwise I keep it mainly nonsexual for the first few months until I start to feel emotionally comfortable around her.Of course, you don’t have to do it this way but I wanted to present it to you and show you what my polite + sincere flirting style looks like. If your personality is similar to mine then you may be able to adopt my style for yourself. Feel free to keep the parts that you like and discard anything that doesn’t fit you.The most important thing to keep in mind is to be your best authentic self around her. No matter what your method of flirting is, there are always going to be women who are turned off by it. Since I don’t kiss until after seven or eight dates, women who are looking for casual sex aren’t going to find my flirting style attractive. That’s totally okay because I’m not the type of person who enjoys casual sex.Flirt in the way that’s authentic to you, and trust that the right women will find you attractive.Thanks for reading! If you're an introverted gentleman (like me), feel free to check out my own website http://ift.tt/2yFp0XK for more dating advice about flirting and talking to women naturally. Cheers! via /r/dating_advice

[catcoule-blog]

toners makeupalley

toner do tiskárny Lanier Are you currently the part of an enormous corporate and business organization that images thousands of files by the day and disposes its employed toner cartridges at the end of the time? Do you frequently learn that your computer printer container has run out of toner/ink cartridge and toss the applied toner ink cartridge or printer ink ink cartridge right away within the garbage? Does your retailer room use a numerous quantity of employed inkjet printer replacements lying down idly? Should your answer to among the earlier mentioned posed concerns is yes, we encourage anyone to feel! Take into account the number of methods to utilize your applied toner cartridges! In this article, we shall recommend a few of the many methods you may employ to make sure that your employed toner replacements tend not to find yourself littering your home or worse, wind up in the dump backyard. 1. Refill Most equipment enable refilling of ink cartridge only one must be sure if one's printer cartridge is created for refilling before choosing to go through the procedure. Refilling toner replacements is actually a project you could handily choose to do your self. Low-cost and user friendly systems are available that allow you to refill your own unfilled printer toner cartridges. Most packages include linked instructions; nevertheless, the subsequent techniques may be useful if a person contains a keen attention and talent in refilling: Make sure you invest in a toner system that accompany manufactured toner bottles, as well as a soldering steel (used to generate a opening) that comes with a decreasing idea. For a lot of the toner cartridges, refilling is quite simple by the "unplug and dump" alternative. Even so, some organizations ensure it is tough to refill the replacements because they earn most by marketing the tubes. The most popular Hewlett packard and Canon tubes are among the instances of these kinds of laser printers Work with a soldering metal to produce a opening with your used toner ink cartridge or get rid of the connect by using pliers. Shake the toner bottle effectively, it may help toner passes swiftly. Get rid of the cover and crack the close in the toner bottle. You can now quickly fill the toner powder inside the ink cartridge via the hole you created. Be certain you depart an aura area while pouring the toner. Wash away any other toner spilled at the outside the hole very carefully together with the duster and close off the golf hole again with any plastic-type or silicone grommet. It can help protect against any seepage down the road. Make sure that you get yourself a toner refill package that is included with a snugly fitted seal off to seal the hole you may have made to avoid leaks inside the device. 2. Recycle Though refilling your employed container will assist you to reduce costs, yet another way will allow you to reduce costs in a good way. You can very carefully remove a pre-owned toner cartridges by marketing those to a remanufacturing organization. Many remanufacturers of toner replacements have set up web sites to help make accessibility easier for those prepared to offer utilized toner/inkjet replacements. These firms will possibly compensate you specifically for your utilized toner cartridges or provide you great deals on new toner replacements. You will find a frequent false impression amongst individuals who refurbished toner toner cartridges include sub-standard toner natural powder that hinders the publishing approach but that is incorrect. 3. Set Up a residence Organization Getting the earlier mentioned factors into mind should allow your innovative fruit drinks to flow and present limitless suggestions about how to cope with used toner tubes. As an example: you may be your personal recycling firm. Acquire your own personal vacant replacements and encourage others to perform exactly the same. Call up your neighbours and inform them to lower away from their employed toner toner cartridges in your place as well as spread out the word about your mini trying to recycle organization. Once you have a great deal of unfilled toner tubes you could potentially either take them to an founded recycling organization yourself or better still, refill them. Though refilling a large number of applied toner tubes will require up a great deal of your time, you possibly can make a considerable amount of funds by offering them back to your neighbours for any revenue! 4. Getting rid of If your toner cartridges can't be reused (because of some harm or currently recycled multiple times), you shouldn't by means of them from the rubbish since inkjet printer tubes consist of Carbon Black which is considered carcinogenic. You will find recycling businesses dedicated in discarding harmful resources, you must deliver your cartridges directly to them. The aforementioned techniques were actually only a few feasible thoughts given to you to help instigate you very clear your cellar or attic room from all of the used toner replacements. With any luck ,, you will end up motivated to implement this sort of enviromentally friendly procedures in terms of these generating matches.

[talabib]

How To Be More Adaptable In Life & Business

What do Allied defense departments battling Nazi Germany in the Second World War, the creators of the iconic Mini Cooper and Starbucks have in common? In a word, adaptability – the ability to change with the times and piggyback on technological and social changes to achieve success.

Adaptability is a skill that’s becoming indispensable in today’s frenetic world of business. Markets and consumer tastes are fickle, and nothing is as likely to land you in hot water as complacency.

In this post, we’ll analyze adaptability in action everywhere from a small Italian village battling post-financial crisis austerity measures, to the boardroom of a multinational coffee chain and the post-war British car industry.

Life is unpredictable even for the successful, which is why adaptability is so important.

In 2009, American golf star Tiger Woods’s position in the sport’s global rankings took a nosedive. By 2011 he’d slipped from number one to 58th place. It was an odd sight, especially since Woods had been known for his incredible consistency since bursting onto the scene in 1996. So what went wrong?

Well, it was a sign of the golfing god’s mortality. Life is unpredictable, and even the most successful people can’t always dodge the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. It turned out that Woods’s on-field performance problems had roots in his personal life.

In 2009, the media ran a story about him crashing his car outside his house. Neighbors told reporters they’d seen his wife chasing after him with a golf club in her hands. Rumors of substance abuse and infidelity began circulating and major sponsors including Gatorade and Gillette dropped their formerly prized sponsee.

Woods didn’t let any of that get to him, however. In fact, he demonstrated just how important adaptability is when you’re faced with setbacks. He continued working hard, even as his stats slipped, and learned how to deal with the media pressure he was under. His perseverance paid off. By March 2013, he was back at the top of world golf rankings.

That makes Woods a poster boy for what experts calls, “High adaptability, high achievement people,” or HAHAs for short. That’s a pretty fitting acronym: HAHAs are people who can laugh in the face of adversity and, over time, claw their way back to the top.

What sets them apart is their ability to focus on solutions rather than problems. They look on the bright side of life even as things seem to be falling apart around them, and they remain determined to achieve their goals. They’re also typically unafraid to ask for help and reach out to people who can support them in their struggle to reassert themselves.

Now that we’ve seen what adaptability looks like in practice, let’s take a look at how it works in business contexts.

Only companies that have perfected the art of adaptability will truly succeed.

At the height of the 2008 financial crisis, the US government offered to bail out car manufacturing giant Ford. Despite being up to its eyeballs in debt and looking like it might go under any day, the company ultimately turned down the proposal.

There was a good reason for this refusal. Chairman Bill Ford was convinced that companies that fail to adapt fail, period. Sure, an injection of government cash might have solved Ford’s short-term liquidity issues, but it wouldn’t have gotten to the root of the problem – its longstanding failure to adapt to the new realities of the automobile market.

The company’s board of directors and its managers decided on an alternative strategy and hatched a plan they called “The Way Forward.” At the heart of this roadmap was a reappraisal of Ford’s relationship with the environment, an issue it had long sidestepped. If the carmaker wanted to remain relevant to American consumers, it would have to move toward their views on environmental matters.

What followed was a pretty radical overhaul. Ford downsized by around 25 percent and implemented a system to produce cars more quickly. Most importantly, it shifted to manufacturing smaller and more fuel-efficient cars.

The carmaker dodged a bullet, but the company almost left it too late. A better idea than waiting it out and hoping for the best would’ve been to take a leaf out of Toyota’s book. The Japanese corporation is a master at adapting to changing market conditions, a characteristic that allowed it to increase its share of the global car market from 7.3 percent in 1995 to 15 percent in 2005.

So what’s the secret of its success? Well, the company has a solid reputation for quality products, but what really sets it apart is its constant search for improvements that satisfy changing consumer preferences. This allowed the company to stay ahead of the curve and anticipate changes in the market long before competitors like Ford saw them coming.

To take just a couple of examples, Toyota was already developing low-emission cars in 1992 and hybrid petrol and electricity-powered vehicles in 1995!

Sometimes adaptability means swimming against the current, and that can help the environment.

In the summer of 2011, the Italian government was facing financial issues. Deciding to cut back on expenditures, it introduced a reform to incorporate villages with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants into larger administrative units headed by a single mayor. But one small village called Filettino resisted these measures. It understood that adaptability sometimes means swimming against the current.

As far as the villagers were concerned, reacting to new developments didn’t mean rushing into old reforms or embracing change for change’s sake. In their view, one way of adapting was to defend the status quo, and that’s precisely what the mayor of Filettino decided to do.

Defying the government, he declared the village’s independence and issued its own currency. It was called the fiorito, meaning ‘flowering’ in Italian – a reference to the settlement’s belief that it would continue to flourish. The village looked to the past for inspiration, harking back to the age before unification when Italy was ruled by many small city-states, kingdoms and principalities. In the end, its act of resistance preserved Filettino’s independence and sense of community.

Headstrong Italian villagers aren’t the only beneficiaries of swimming against the current, however. Bucking trends and following one’s own path has also helped a number of companies thrive.

Take Levi Strauss as an example. Manufacturing jeans is traditionally a resource-intensive operation. The finishing process alone requires around ten separate washes and gallons of water. If the jeans have a special pattern or a fade effect, that requirement increases even further. That was accepted as a given until the American firm decided to shake things up.

Rather than simply going along with the idea that the only thing that matters in business is generating profits, Levi Strauss began factoring environmental considerations into their calculations. Soon enough the company had figured out a way of finishing jeans without using any water at all. By using stones to soften the fabric and rinsing them with a special type of resin, the company cut its water consumption by an incredible 96 percent!

Adaptability is an innate part of the way the brain functions.

It was a regular day in New York in 1985 when Pedro Bach-y-Rita, a Spanish teacher who’d lived a happy and successful life in the city for many years, suddenly collapsed. He’d suffered a massive stroke and was left paralyzed. The doctors treating Bach-y-Rita claimed there was nothing they could do for him. But they were wrong.

What they had underestimated was how adaptable humans are. Both of Bach-y-Rita’s sons were in medical school when their father fell ill. Unhappy with his doctors’ diagnoses, they decided to physically re-educate him from scratch, as though he were a baby. The first task they set themselves was teaching him to crawl using kneepads and the support of a wall.

Once he’d mastered that, they began setting more difficult tasks like catching balls, which were designed to train his motor systems. Bach-y-Rita made remarkable progress under their supervision. He was soon sitting and, a little later, walking. Astonishingly, within a year he was back at work teaching Spanish at the City College of New York, where he remained until his retirement.

So how did Bach-y-Rita regain control over his basic motor functions despite the serious brain damage he’d suffered during his stroke? It comes down to the plasticity of the human brain. Essentially, the undamaged parts of his brain took control of the damaged areas.

Bach-y-Rita’s son Paul returned to medical school after helping his father. He later became one of the first scientists to verify the theory of neural plasticity – the idea that the human brain’s capacities and functions aren’t set in stone but can adapt and change.

In one experiment, Paul demonstrated that blindfolded participants were able to catch balls thanks to a head-mounted camera which relayed images to their brains through sensory receptors on their tongues. That’s a shining example of how different neural pathways and neurons in the brain can adapt and tackle new tasks, like interpreting images.

Effective adaptation means learning from mistakes and resisting the urge to go back to square one.

When people first fail at a task, they tend to lower their expectations and claim that at least they learned something from their mistakes. The crucial question, though, is what past failures teach us: Do we learn how to fail, or how to improve so we don’t fail again?

Adaptability is, in large part, the art of learning from mistakes – ideally, the mistakes of others! Take the British automobile industry. In the 1950s, virtually every carmaker was set on developing ever more powerful – and fuel-guzzling – vehicles. They were so fixated on this goal that they overlooked a massive segment of the market: young, urban and environmentally-minded people.

The advantage thus passed to German competitors who were churning out popular, compact microcars like the Messerschmitt KR200. As a result, British brands were being crowded out altogether. Did that make them change their approach? Hardly. There was, however, one notable exception: a small team of auto engineers at the British Motor Company headed by designer Sir Alec Issigonis.

Observing their peers’ stubborn refusal to change with the times, the team decided to spearhead the production of a new style of car – the iconic Mini marketed by Morris Mini-Minor. Learning from the mistakes of others and adapting to new consumer preferences quickly led to success. Over the following decades, the British Motor Company went on to sell over five million Minis.

That said, you can take learning from mistakes too far, as PepsiCo found out in 2009 when it developed a new brand image for Tropicana orange juice. When the company’s massive marketing campaign backfired and sales plummeted by 20 percent, PepsiCo panicked.

Realizing that the branding made the product look anonymous and cheap rather than promoting awareness of its quality, they scrambled back to square one. Instead of making a few minor tweaks and fixing the mistake, they reverted to the old branding. The upshot? They blew $33 million to change absolutely nothing!

Successful companies understand that experimentation is crucial to adaptability.

In 1940, Adolf Hitler ordered the shutdown of all weapons development research programs expected to take longer than six months to reach completion. It was a costly miscalculation for Germany. Why? Because experimentation is the cornerstone of effective adaptation.

The mistake would haunt Nazi Germany as the tide gradually turned against it in the Second World War. While German scientists were shackled to short-term targets, their Allied counterparts were given free rein to experiment with new weapon technologies for as long as they pleased. When defense scientist William Butement came up with an idea to develop a proximity fuse, for example, he was encouraged to delve deeper.

A proximity fuse is a useful piece of gadgetry if you’re in the middle of a shooting war. A bomb fitted with the fuse’s radar technology will only detonate when it’s sufficiently close to its targets. Older bomb types, on the other hand, used standard timers that often exploded long before – or after – they’d reached their targets. Needless to say, the bombs with the proximity fuses did the most damage.

Crafting the perfect proximity fuse took time and dedication, and it was only after years of experimentation with prototypes that the finished article was ready for deployment. It came just in the nick of time. In 1944, a German counteroffensive caught the Allies off guard and the outcome of the Battle of the Bulge hung in the balance. Lucky that they had the perfect weapon to beat back the onslaught: artillery units equipped with lethally accurate proximity fuse shells.

Experimentation also has its uses in the metaphorical war between businesses. Take Apple, a company that has long been synonymous with a culture of experimentation. When its new products meet a negative reception, it shelves them and gets to work on a superior alternative. You may or may not remember Apple’s first handheld computer – the clunky, error-prone Newton. The Newton crashed and burned and Apple responded by going back to the drawing board. The result? Its designers used the prototype to develop the iPod, iPhone and iPad.

Rushing to adapt can lead to a crash, and failing to think ahead isn’t any better.

Learning to drive is thrilling. The world suddenly becomes broader as exciting new possibilities come into focus. But you have to be careful. It’s easy to get carried away and put your foot down. That’s when things go wrong and you find yourself at risk.

The same thing happens to businesses when they push too hard: the wheels come off and they crash. Take Netflix. The company understood that the future of movie watching was streaming before any of its competitors, and it steamed ahead. What was the problem, then? It was too quick for its subscribers, who were still satisfied with the old offer which allowed them to rent DVDs and stream for $9.99 a month.

In 2011, Netflix decided to push its customers and split their offering into two separate components: rentals and streaming, now priced at $7.99 each – a pretty hefty price hike for people who wanted to continue using both services.

The decision didn’t go down well. Netflix hemorrhaged a million subscribers and the value of its shares fell by 25 percent. The service did eventually recover, of course, but if it hadn’t been so hasty it would have achieved its current success much sooner.

Failing to anticipate changes in the market is even more damaging, however, as Blockbuster found out. Founded in 1985, the movie rental business quickly grew over the following decades. By 2008, it had thousands of stores across the US. But despite its dominant position in the market, it was caught entirely unawares by the streaming revolution.

Even worse, it failed to launch its own streaming service while Netflix began establishing itself. That would have been simple enough – after all, Blockbuster held all the aces: it was a household name with a large customer base and plenty of capital.

But Blockbuster wasn’t nimble enough to adapt to new realities. It continued focusing on customer experience in its bricks-and-mortar stores even after a new CEO was hired in 2007. By 2010, the writing was on the wall. Blockbuster declared bankruptcy and was gobbled up by the American TV company Dish Network.

Radical leadership is often the only solution when companies lose sight of their goals.

It’s easy to look good when the economy’s booming and you’re backed by a reputation built up over decades. But success can breed complacency. The result of taking your eye off the ball? You lose sight of your goals.

Take Starbucks. Everything had been plain sailing for decades when it hit the rocks in 2007. The coffee chain’s chairman Howard Schultz had an idea about what had gone wrong: its dominant position had incubated an arrogant outlook and the company had stopped taking care of its customers.

He was right. Formerly loyal patrons weren’t happy and had started going elsewhere in search of their coffee fix. That same year, Starbucks closed over 900 stores and fired 1,000 of its employees. That was the end of the growth policy championed by the company’s CEO between 2002 and 2007, Jim Donald, who had become obsessed with opening more and more stores. The mad rush to expand had resulted in Starbucks losing touch with its founding values.

In the end, Starbucks scraped through this rough patch. So how did it turn things around? Well, it had a leader who was prepared to push through radical reforms: Howard Schultz. One of the first things he did after taking charge was to close 7,000 Starbucks stores in the US and give every barista extra training to help them up their coffee game. When a test revealed that McDonald’s had better-tasting coffee than Starbucks, Schultz introduced new roasting and grinding processes.

None of that was rocket science. Schultz simply understood that a coffee chain has to do two things to retain its customers’ loyalty: prepare a great cup of joe and offer a selection of delicious cakes and pastries. But sometimes it takes a radical visionary to do the commonsensical thing. By 2010, his policy had paid off. Starbucks had recovered and its revenue increased to $10.7 billion!

That just goes to show how important adaptability is when you’re struggling to get ahead or just treading water. While you shouldn’t rush change, it’s worth keeping an open mind, experimenting and seeing what incremental changes you can make to improve your situation.

Adaptability is all about looking ahead, reading the signs and using the prevailing winds to chart your course. Once you’ve mastered that art, you can plan ahead and avoid being caught off guard by sudden changes. That’s especially true in business. The most successful companies consistently demonstrate an ability to change with the times, experiment with new solutions and adapt themselves to customers’ changing desires and needs.

 Action plan: Believe in the impossible. What stops us adapting? Well, nothing throttles innovation like the belief that some things are simply impossible. Take it from American biologist George Church. He was convinced he could design a machine that could decode the entire human genome. Ignoring the naysayers, Church pressed ahead with his vision and constructed his device. While the procedure initially cost a staggering $3 billion, Church managed to reduce the price to just $5,000 over the years. Today, there’s a real chance that it might become affordable enough to be integrated into routine medical testing, opening up the possibility of all sorts of medical breakthroughs!