44 Favorite Books of High Achievers

5. Turn The Ship Around by L. David Marquet
“Turn the Ship Around isn’t a typical business book. It’s not about business at all, but it offers a fundamentally critical lesson for all leaders and managers. The key premise is that when people come to you for permission to do something, they rarely consider all the outcomes and rarely take on full accountability. The author, an experienced Navy officer, took commission and control of the USS Santa Fe, a nuclear-powered submarine, and overhauled the performance of the crew–leading them from last place in the fleet to first place. Instead of having his crew ask permission and seek orders, he told them to come to him with intent. Instead of ‘Captain, may I turn the ship starboard 10 degrees?,’ he wanted people to come to him and say ‘Captain, I’m going to turn the ship starboard 10 degrees.’ The difference seems minor, but the effect is enormous. ‘May I’ puts the responsibility on the manager or leader. ‘I’m going to’ puts the responsibility on the person taking action. By stating intent, that person must live with the consequences of their action and will think more completely about the action and its consequences. This small change turns followers into leaders, and as I’ve seen in my own company, works incredibly well in business.”

–Ross Kimbarovsky, founder and CEO of crowdSPRING, one of the world’s leading marketplaces for crowdsourced logo design, web design, graphic design, product design, and company naming services

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Netflix Hasn’t Found an Expectation It Can’t Beat

Those numbers reflect the company’s explosion in international markets. Of the 7.41 million new subscribers in the latest quarter, 5.46 million came from outside the U.S. And there is still lots of room to grow, especially in Latin American markets where the average consumer’s video intake (four to five hours daily) nears that of American consumers (over five hours daily). By contrast, European markets such as France and Germany notch a slightly more moderate three to four hours

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The Era of Fake Video Begins

In a dank corner of the internet, it is possible to find actresses from Game of Thrones or Harry Potter engaged in all manner of sex acts. Or at least to the world the carnal figures look like those actresses, and the faces in the videos are indeed their own. Everything south of the neck, however, belongs to different women. An artificial intelligence has almost seamlessly stitched the familiar visages into pornographic scenes, one face swapped for another. The genre is one of the cruelest, most invasive forms of identity theft invented in the internet era. At the core of the cruelty is the acuity of the technology: A casual observer can’t easily detect the hoax.

This development, which has been the subject of much hand-wringing in the tech press, is the work of a programmer who goes by the nom de hack “deepfakes.” And it is merely a beta version of a much more ambitious project. One of deepfakes’s compatriots told Vice’s Motherboard site in January that he intends to democratize this work. He wants to refine the process, further automating it, which would allow anyone to transpose the disembodied head of a crush or an ex or a co-worker into an extant pornographic clip with just a few simple steps. No technical knowledge would be required. And because academic and commercial labs are developing even more-sophisticated tools for non-pornographic purposes—algorithms that map facial expressions and mimic voices with precision—the sordid fakes will soon acquire even greater verisimilitude.

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