Word: ericsson
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...While 10 years is a necessary minimum to achieve expertise in most fields, it doesn't guarantee success. As Anders Ericsson writes in the introduction to the 901-page Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (2006), "The number of years of experience in a domain is a poor predictor of attained performance." Ericsson, 60, is a professor at Florida State who moved to the U.S. from his native Sweden in 1976 to study with Simon, co-author of the seminal chess paper. (Simon went on to win a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on decision-making.) Today...
...Ericsson, a large, gentle man with unkempt salt-and-pepper hair and a button on his jacket missing, has become the world's leading expert on experts, a term he distinguishes from "expert performers" - those individuals, possessing both experience and superior skill, who tend to win Nobel Prizes or international chess competitions or Olympic medals. Ericsson notes that some entire classes of experts - for instance, those who pick stocks for a living - are barely better than novices. (Experienced investors do perform a little ahead of chance, his studies show, but not enough to outweigh transaction costs...
...Ericsson's primary finding is that rather than mere experience or even raw talent, it is dedicated, slogging, generally solitary exertion - repeatedly practicing the most difficult physical tasks for an athlete, repeatedly performing new and highly intricate computations for a mathematician - that leads to first-rate performance. And it should never get easier; if it does, you are coasting, not improving. Ericsson calls this exertion "deliberate practice," by which he means the kind of practice we hate, the kind that leads to failure and hair-pulling and fist-pounding. You like the Tuesday New York Times crossword? You have...
...that hardly matters. In Tunis, there are now entire new districts of office buildings, with signs announcing the recent arrival of multinationals like Pfizer, Ericsson and Siemens; in October Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer flew in to weigh new ventures in the country. Amid the pizza parlors, cappuccino bars and bowling alleys, realtors advertise million-dollar villas with pools and saunas, while shopping malls are jammed with Tunisians buying food and furniture imported from Europe. With the embrace of Western-style capitalism has come social change, too: the biggest TV hit this year was Star Academy Maghreb, a homegrown version...
...Nokia may not be the only handset vendor looking longingly at services. Rival Sony Ericsson, currently offers a limited collection of tunes from sister recording company Sony BMG, but may soon expand. "We'll have more to say in the future," says president Miles Flint. Sony Ericsson would follow Nokia's tactic of slowly building up to a full-on Web services push. In the last couple of years, Nokia has taken many small steps, tying phones into Yahoo, Flickr photo sharing and content from Turner Broadcasting, among others. Last fall, it launched a music Web site called Music Recommenders...