From Alphonso O'Neil-White's eighth-floor downtown office on West Genesee Street, the view of the Buffalo outer harbor and the burgeoning downtown landscape is inspiring.

O'Neil-White, the president and CEO of BlueCross BlueShield of Western New York and a member of the Cultures of Giving Legacy Initiative Council, shared his view of the city and his success story with 20 students from Buffalo schools Monday.

O'Neil-White spoke at the council's second "Success Looks Like Me" event about his journey and what it takes to be successful, and he answered students' questions about his job and how he made it to the top of BlueCross BlueShield.

Ruben Santiago-Hudson, an actor and director and a Lackawanna native, spoke at the council's first event in May.

The council, made up of multicultural leaders from across the city, is a collaborative, philanthropic effort to make a difference in the lives of young people living in Buffalo's low-income communities.

"Students can read about success in newspapers or in books, but until they see it up close and personal - I think it has a much better impact on them," O'Neil-White said. "One of the things the council is trying to achieve is giving them access to a variety of experiences, people and situations. So they know that they have choices, and for them to get a fix on what choice they might make when the time comes."

The council works with the Boys and Girls Club of Buffalo, the Buffalo Urban League and the Belle Center to find students in a low-income and challenging environment who demonstrate leadership qualities. Recently the council established a partnership with the Buffalo Public Schools and hopes to broaden its reach in the community.

W. Charles Brady, director of social studies for Buffalo Public Schools, said the council is doing commendable work and is mak

ing a difference.

"It allows students to interact with people that had similar situations, and now those individuals are able to give back," Brady said. "They can show young people how to be successful."

Continued here:
A front-row seat to success

SPARTANBURG, SC (FOX Carolina) -

Tuesday was America's night out. It was achance for neighbors and law enforcement to come together and stop crime.

"It's an opportunity for us to re-connect with neighborhoods. We are already connected but we get to get a little more personal and get to listen to some of their problems or issues they have going on in the neighborhood," said Officer Randy Hardy, who is over crime prevention in Spartanburg.

He said Converse Heights is just one neighborhood where the crime stats have gone down. These days neighbors said all they worry about is the rareminor theft.

"WellI think we havehad our fair share of car break-ins and that sort of thing so it was a good opportunity to at least talk with our local police officers. The mayor was here so it was good to voice those concerns," said Josh Page, a neighborhood organizer for National Night Out.

Neighbors said the first step in dealing withcrime concerns is tomeet the person living next door and know who lives in the area.

"We have a lot of people in the neighborhood that walk around andjog... to come up and see them close up and meet them is great," said Leonard Nesbit who lives in the Converse Heights neighborhood.

Simply put, neighborhood crime and drug prevention boils down to neighbors being neighbors.

"If someone is out of town we try to keep an eye out on their house and not let the newspapers stack up and things like that," said Wesley Hammond who lives in Converse Heights.

Copyright 2012 FOX Carolina (Meredith Corporation). All rights reserved

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National Night Out finds success in Spartanburg neighborhood

COSTA MESA, CA--(Marketwire -08/07/12)- MLC & Associates, Inc., a management-consulting firm focused on improving clients' people, processes, technology and facilities, is celebrating 25 years of positioning its clients for growth and success and has also announced the promotion of Prashant Kumar to president and CEO to lead the firm's aggressive plans for continued expansion. The company doubled sales between 2011 and 2012 and is aiming for similar annual growth for the next five years, including the addition of new offices in across the United States and India.

MLC & Associates helps large- and mid-size clients with business continuity, corporate performance management and organizational development, drawing from a team with a wealth of experience and expertise in finance, engineering and economics. The company's strengths have helped MLC beat the odds; just one in four new-employer firms survive beyond 15 years(1), and MLC has been thriving for 25.

"We've weathered three recessions because of our forward-thinking capabilities and honest, personal style," says Mary Carrido, Chairman and Founder of MLC & Associates. "Clients know they can trust us for the truly personalized service and honest assessments that guide them through major organizational change and transformational improvement. Prashant is part of our own corporate change, having brought a special expertise in corporate performance management as well as a keen understanding of our ambitious expansion projects. In a day and age where even major corporations often don't survive 25 years, we're confidently anticipating another quarter of a century of growth under Prashant's leadership."

The firm evolved since 1987, accommodating the service lines and expertise to best help clients' growth, including MLC's emphasis on business continuity and expansion of capabilities in corporate performance management and cloud technology. Leveraging cloud technology has broadened MLC's reach to offer smaller clients access to Fortune 500-level services by packaging its core services in a way that's affordable for smaller companies. While implementing changes in large organizations can take more time, opening MLC's services up to mid-size companies has allowed the management consultancy to make an impressive impact on clients' futures. Kumar's commitment to cloud technology has presented MLC's service lines to a previously underserved market.

MLC is uniquely able to bridge the gap between strategy, tactics and operations -- working with companies to see a plan through from start to finish. Clients benefit form MLC's strong focus on key performance indicators and metrics, which are integral to all of the firms' practices and offer clients the ability to track progress and ROI.

"We really practice what we preach, constantly examining and refining our own people, processes and technologies to better serve our clients," says Prashant Kumar, newly appointed president and CEO of MLC & Associates. "That's part of what puts us a decade ahead of any competitor, and it's what makes companies choose us time and again over larger firms that simply can't offer the same consistent ROI that we do. From implementing cloud technology throughout each of our practices, to expanding our service offerings and capabilities, and holding ourselves accountable with key performance indicators and metrics -- MLC works tirelessly to ensure programs are effective and efficient from ideation through execution. I'm proud to lead such a uniquely talented and dedicated team."

ABOUT MLC & ASSOCIATES, INC.: MLC & Associates, Inc. is a world-class management consulting firm that helps large- and mid-size companies in every industry with business continuity, corporate performance management and organizational development that draws from faith-based core values. Clients like AT&T, Sony Pictures, The Irvine Company, SAS and Mattel trust MLC's incredibly experienced team to position people, technology, processes and facilities to drive ROI and institute positive changes in company culture and efficiency, always with an emphasis on listening, integrity and exceeding expectations. MLC begins each relationship by understanding how to serve the client, the culture and the organization through organizational problem-solving, increasing efficiencies, reducing operational risk and achieving organizational goals. For more information, visit http://www.mlchq.com.

(1) U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Census Bureau, Business Dynamics Statistics; U.S. Dept of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, BED.

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MLC & Associates Celebrates 25 Years of Success and Appoints New President & CEO Prashant Kumar

By Michael Nolan - August 7, 2012 | Tickers: COST, LUV, TGT, WMT | 0 Comments

Michael is a member of The Motley Fool Blog Network -- entries represent the personal opinions of our bloggers and are not formally edited.

Costco. Normally, I like to build suspense about the stock I'm sharing with you, but, today, I'm coming right out with it: Costco (NASDAQ: COST) is a perfect long-term stock. But you shouldn't trust just anyone who tells you what to invest in: you should have evidence; you should have proof.

So, what's the secret behind Costco? Well, you already know its keys to success: wholesale prices, seemingly unlimited amount of products, etc. But what is the key behind the scenes that differs Costco from its competitors?

Well, what fun would we have if I gave everything away immediately. I mean, come on, I already gave you the ticker. I can't just hand over everything.

So before I get to Costco's secret, why don't I start with the long-term case for Costco.

Costco: Profile of a Company

Several elements of the goliath make Costco into the successful company that it is: the wholesale factor I mentioned earlier, the low-cost/high-profit element, in addition to a few other parts of the discount store. Yet, many successful companies are publicly traded. Success isn't enough to make me click "buy" for the long run. So what makes Costco perfect for years to come?

Check out Costco's Return on Equity (ROE): according to theory, the company with the highest ROE (in comparison to its competitors) typically brings the best returns to its shareholders. Costco's ROE is 12.50 -- a very competitive ROE. Rival SuperValu's ROE is negative ... not very impressive.

Now, how about their dividend? Well, a 1.1% dividend isn't whopping, but it is something.

Continue reading here:
One Perfect Long-Term Stock...And the Secret Behind its Success

In an old hangar at the Santa Monica Airport, Louise Anne Marler, a graphic designer who specializes in pop art-style imagery of vintage manual typewriters, is showing off her next subject - a Bing No. 2 compact portable.

This relic of 1920s German ingenuity was a gift from her father.

"He has a cellar and a barn full of these things," says Marler, recalling how her dad's collection would spill over into different rooms of the house and become part of the d cor as she was growing up. But that was before the word processor and personal computer brought an end to the typewriter.

In fact, of all the machines destined for the history books the manual typewriter should probably top the list. But like vinyl records

Call it a push back against technology.

"The typewriter does one thing and it does it well: It types," says filmmaker Gary Nicholson, who documents the trend in "The Typewriter (in the 21st Century)." It opens in select theaters and film festivals starting in September, including a screening at 4 p.m. Sept. 1 at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, 681 Venice Blvd., Venice - beyondbaroque.org.

The film, directed by Christopher Lockett, explores the trend from the viewpoint of typewriter repairmen, high-end collectors, teachers, journalists and students.

"A lot of people think it's just the hipsters using typewriters but what I found is it's a lot of tech people," Nicholson says. "We feature one programmer who talks about how the power went off one day while he was in the middle of writing code, trying to figure out a function, so he just started typing up code on his typewriter."

The film also showcases bloggers who type their posts the old-fashioned way, scan the page into the computer and upload it to their blog, authors who

Santa Monica-based graphic artist Louise Marier with her German Bing No. 2 typewriter. Marier turns old mechanical typewriters into art. (David Crane/Staff Photographer)

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Keys to Success: Fascination with typewriters becomes the write stuff for creative venture

Consumers who have become accustomed to the customer-focused practices adopted by hotels, banks and retailers increasingly are judging physicians by those standards, according to consulting firm PwC.

The firm examined consumer opinions of health care customer service and compared it with other industries, using data from the firms 2012 Experience Radar survey. PwC surveyed 6,000 U.S. consumers online between May and July 2011.

PwC advises physicians and hospitals to try to win over customers with convenient, personalized, warm service not only because it makes patients happy, but also because pay is at stake. Medicare and other payers now include patient satisfaction scores in pay-for-performance programs, and some insurers global payment contracts include bonus pay that is dependent not only on clinical quality scores, but also on how patients rate their experiences.

Physicians skeptical of tying pay to satisfaction scores have argued that what consumers want is not always what is best for patients. Doctors say basing pay on the happiness of patients creates incentives to do things like overprescribe antibiotics or run unnecessary diagnostic tests that patients demand.

Only 8% of patients rank price as the top factor in choosing a doctor or hospital.

But Mark Friedberg, MD, a Boston-based internist and researcher at RAND Corp., rejects that argument. There is no reason physicians cant deliver the best care while also trying to give patients the best possible experiences, he said.

I dont think its unreasonable to ask clinicians to meet multiple goals, he said. It is possible for highly trained professionals to be excellent in all respects.

Even when it isnt tied to pay rates, customer satisfaction plays a huge role in attracting and retaining patients at a physicians office or a hospital even more so than price, which is the top consideration for customers in other businesses. PwC found that only 8% of consumers ranked price as the top factor in choosing a doctor or hospital, compared to 50% for health insurance, 55% for retail business, and 69% for personal travel.

Satisfied patients also spur additional business, to a greater degree than happy customers do for hotels, airlines or other vendors. The PwC survey showed that personal recommendations were 2.6 times more likely to influence a purchase in health care than in other industries. Nine out of 10 patients were willing to recommend a physician or hospital after a positive experience. Multiple studies by other researchers have found that online physician reviews most often are positive.

However, the PwC research also showed that an unsatisfactory experience what the firm refers to as a negative moment of truth is harder to reconcile in health care than it is in other industries. An apology and acknowledgement of a mistake or problem would be more likely to pacify customers who were angry about a bad hotel stay or purchase than a patient upset about a bad experience with a hospital or physician.

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Satisfaction scores seen as crucial to physician success

More than 30 million U.S. viewers have been tuning in to the London Olympics each day, and many more are catching Gabby Douglas and Ryan Lochte online. If you've been paying close attention to the winners' facial expressions, body language, and comments, it's possible you've noticed an odd phenomenon: The bronze-medal winners may seem happier with their achievements than those who grabbed the silver.

At least that was the conclusion of a 1995 academic paper by Victoria Husted Medvec, Scott Madey, and Thomas Gilovich, which was the subject of a a recent report on NPR. The study's authors examined the facial expressions of Olympic medal winners on the podium during the 1992 competition in Barcelona. Even after controlling for other factors, their hypothesis held up: Bronze medal winners seemed more content with their prizes than those who took home the silver.

The researchers chalked up these findings to a phenomenon that social scientists call framing--the tendency to respond to events based on our own experiences and cultures. The silver medal winners framed their performance relative to the gold medal winners, and berated themselves for not being able to emerge victorious even though doing so was close at hand. The bronze-medal winners, meanwhile, didn't judge their success alongside the gold and silver winners, but relative to the many athletes who will leave the games without winning any medals at all.

The concept of framing has been an important one in the realm of money and finance, too. In one famous study by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, shoppers said they would drive 20 minutes to save $5 on a $15 calculator, but wouldn't drive the same distance to save $5 on a $125 calculator. The savings were the same in both instances, the frames were not.

The Olympics study, meanwhile, has particularly rich implications for how investors view their own performance. By framing our success or failure relative to the wrong yardstick, we risk not only making ourselves miserable, but undermining our financial well-being at the same time. Here are some ways to ensure that you're using the right frame of reference when evaluating how you're doing.

MYOBThe obvious takeaway from the Olympics study is one we probably all got from our parents at an early age: mind your own business. Just as mentally healthy athletes know that the real gauge of success is how well they've delivered on their own expectations for themselves, the true measure of your investing performance is whether you're getting closer to your goals as the years go by, not whether you're beating Warren Buffett or your boastful brother-in-law. Yet it's easy to see how so many investors fall into the silver-medal trap: They start buying stocks and funds without stopping to think what will constitute personal success or attempting to quantify what they'll actually need for financial goals such as retirement.

Online tools such as T. Rowe Price's Retirement Income Calculator and Morningstar's Asset Allocator can provide a rough gauge of whether your current investments and asset allocation, combined with your planned future contributions, put you on track to reach your goals on an inflation-adjusted basis. Revisiting your progress toward your goal should be the linchpin of any portfolio checkup, as I discussed in this midyear checkup presentation, and can help you stay focused on what factors you actually control.

Be Honest About Your AbilitiesEven though your progress toward your financial goals should be the main measure of how well you're doing, that doesn't mean you shouldn't keep track of how good your investment choices have been. Are you adding value relative to an inexpensive, plain-vanilla benchmark or subtracting it?

To find out, I advise creating a custom benchmark that matches your own portfolio's asset allocation, saving it in our Portfolio Manager tool, and using it to gauge your investment-selection acumen on an ongoing basis. I discussed the specifics of setting up such a benchmark in this article (http://news.morningstar.com/articlenet/article.aspx?id=357708). If your stocks and funds underperform a benchmark consisting of simple, inexpensive index funds over time, it's wise to ask yourself whether you might not better off investing in such a cheap, low-maintenance index fund or exchange-traded fund portfolio instead.

Don't Get Hung Up on 'The Best'Finally, too many investors, like the dour-looking Silver medal-winning Olympians, have an unhealthy preoccupation with "the best"--they want to buy the best stocks at the lowest possible prices, and they want their funds to be at the top of the heap at any given point in time. That's a misplaced effort and one that will almost certainly lead to misery and too much trading. Rather than obsessing over obtaining the lowest possible price for a stock or engaging in the impossible task of finding a fund that will always be on top, your best bet is to stack the deck in your favor by keeping your asset allocation sensible and practicing smart portfolio-management techniques like dollar-cost averaging and rebalancing. Those strategies all but guarantee your performance won't be "the best," but they also greatly improve the odds that it will be far better than average, as I discussed in this article (http://news.morningstar.com/articlenet/article.aspx?id=396889).

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Your Investment Performance and the Silver Medal Trap

by Dan Bickley - Aug. 5, 2012 04:19 PM The Republic | azcentral.com

WIMBLEDON, England -- The old scouting report on Great Britain was simple: Put its athletes on a bike or in a boat, and they're dangerous. They have a knack for sports that require sitting down.

But give them Olympic home-field advantage, and it's bloody hell.

Andy Murray became the latest toast of London, demolishing the great Roger Federer on Sunday with shocking ease (6-2, 6-1, 6-4) in the men's tennis final. The triumph carried great personal significance.

It marked the long-awaited breakthrough for Murray, who is 0 for 4 in grand slam finals. It atoned for his loss to Federer on Centre Court just four weeks ago, where Murray's tearful concession speech turned him into a sympathetic figure.

How often does one get a second chance so quickly?

But there is a much bigger story in play. Murray's triumph came less than 24 hours after Great Britain's greatest day ever in the Olympics. Three track stars won gold medals, turning a Saturday evening into a massive Brit party, a night when BBC commentators gushed like unabashed homers.

Pubs were crammed. In one of them, a viewer was transfixed with the medal count on the screen, beaming with national pride that Great Britain was actually in third place, behind China and the U.S.

That energy was the story at Wimbledon, where Federer seemed to wilt under its force, where the Brits couldn't believe what they were seeing.

"I watched the athletics last night, and it was unbelievable ... it gave me a boost coming into today," Murray said. "The momentum the team's had the last couple of days has been good."

Originally posted here:
London's local success in Olympics raises question: When does U.S. want back in?

By mark cabaniss - August 6, 2012 | Tickers: AMZN, EBAY, MCD, SBUX | 0 Comments

mark is a member of The Motley Fool Blog Network -- entries represent the personal opinions of our bloggers and are not formally edited.

It happens to all great companies. They win. The burger wars, the shoeshine wars, the detergent wars -- at some point, a company clearly emerges as the leader, and its competitors as also-rans. And then, what? What is left after victory? For some, such as McDonald's, (NYSE: MCD) there is no acknowledgement of "victory," but only a single-minded focus on sustaining and improving profitability, as though the company was still number two, forever trying harder. McDonald's expands their menu only slowly, and after extensive test-marketing. When they see an opportunity for easy profits, they move in, as with their McCafe line of coffee beverages. After Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX) did the heavy lifting of popularizing lattes and cappucinos, McDonald's piggybacked on their success, simultaneously making a nice profit while undercutting a competitor. But McDonald's still doesn't sell pizza, or tacos. No, they are a burger chain, number one, and very focused on staying there. For others, victory means it is time to move on to new endeavors. They branch out, buying or building new businesses. They diversify, (or lose focus, depending on your point of view.)

The sixties was the high water mark of the conglomerate. Companies bought other companies, oftentimes, lots of them. It didn't matter if they were in the same industry. The idea was to leverage borrowing costs and management -- if a management team could run a tire company, why, they surely could also run a movie theater chain, and a smoked clam cannery, and maybe a map or telescope company, right? Well no; often wrong, actually. Gulf+Western used to own the Miss Universe beauty pageant, the Associates finance company, and the Desilu TV production company, as well as mattress, cigar, sugar, record, publishing, and auto parts businesses, among others. Oh, and also Madison Square Garden, and with it the New York Knicks and the New York Rangers. Today, Gulf+Western is gone, having disappeared piece by piece, as it sold itself off in an ongoing, decades-long attempt to slim down and focus. With just a few exceptions, such as Leucadia National, Loews Corporation and, most notably, Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway, conglomerates such as Gulf+Western are mostly gone, having been dismantled in the 80s, as companies have sold off sideline businesses, and focused on improving core competencies.

Which brings us to Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN). What exactly does Amazon do? Is Amazon losing it's focus? Where are they going? They are the World's number one online retailer, but they are rapidly morphing out of or outgrowing or leaving that business and going into the packing and shipping business as a fulfillment agent for other online merchants. Last quarter their third party shipments increased to 40% of total units shipped from 36% the prior quarter. That is a huge shift. Amazon bulls are, for whatever reason, mostly applauding this move. But if that trend keeps up, and Amazon's units shipped become 50%, 70%, 90% third party, they will cease to be a retailer, becoming something between eBay and UPSa combination internet selling platform and third-party warehouser, packer, and shipper. Is this a good idea? Who knows?

I find it puzzling that Amazon gets credit for displacing bricks-and-mortar retailers even as it transforms itself into a bricks-and-mortar warehouser.This year, Amazon has opened six new fulfillment centers, that is, giant bricks-and-mortar operations, with twelve more in the works. Will these prove a smart investment, or money-hemorraging Taj Mahals tied like millstones around the neck of Amazon's earnings statements? I don't know, and I'm not sure that anyone else does, either.

Amazon is also, for now, a cloud services company, and a portable computer company, with the Kindle Fire. What do these businesses have to do with each other? Yes, I know that people can buy Amazon's online product offerings via their Kindles, but they can also shop Amazon from their laptops and desktops, and smartphones, a business which, incidentally, Amazon is talking about getting into, to further compete with Apple. Question: if it is a good idea for Amazon to start making telephones, why would it not also be a good idea for them to start making computers, and go into business against Dell?

I cannot help but admire Amazon CEO Jeffrey Bezos. He is an example of the ideal self-made man. He could take his billions and retire into a life of consumeristic hedonism, jetting around the globe drinking champagne, collecting houses and art. Instead, he chooses to keep working as hard as ever, in the great American tradition of Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and Steve Jobs. However, I think Amazon may have fallen into the trap of trying to maintain it's growth rate by getting into new ventures. Some say that a company is like a shark -- it has to keep moving or it dies. But there is an obvious danger in growth for growth's sake. If you just move move move, too quickly, you may find that you have moved into a blind alley, and have committed huge amounts of time and money to vast and unprofitable ventures. You may find yourself like some sixties conglomerate, trying to focus on your core competency and shed businesses that only a few years before sounded like such good ideas.

Whither Amazon? They are moving, 'tis true, but where?

My brother once said "All of my problems are first-world problems." My investing credo: money, while nice, is ultimately only money.

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Is Success Killing Amazon?

Is business success built mainly on personal savvy, taking risks, and seizing opportunities? Does achievement run like an Olympic sprinter who beats competitors?

Or is business success dependent on doing one's best with personal abilities, but admitting that If it's meant to be, it's up to me is a faulty slogan. A family loan, good education, counsel from a relative help achieve marketplace success.

Don't we also win the Gold in business running like a relay runner? Each is dependent on team members to pass the baton and sprint toward the finish line.

At the London Olympics, each starting block has a speaker installed in it. No longer will the runner in the lane closest to the starter have a millisecond advantage of hearing the gun go off. Now each runner gets help from speakers in starting blocks.

Isn't this upgrade for sprinters symbolic of what happens when businesses succeed? Success hinges on both personal striving and communal support.

Comedian Jon Stewart asks, Why are some suspicious of businesses which get government help and apply for tax incentives, labeling this 'grade school Marxism'? Our elementary school teachers taught us to share. Isn't this the key to success?

At the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Mitt Romney gave a pep talk to athletes, reminding them to be grateful and humble. They don't earn gold medals strictly by their own skill, Romney stressed. Winners don't have exclusive claim on records they establish. Each receives lots of help along the way.

Success is a combination of running like a sprinter and participating in a relay race.

You Olympians, however, know you didn't get here solely on your own, declared Romney prior to the opening ceremonies of the Salt Lake City Olympics. For most of you, loving parents, sisters or brothers, encouraged your hopes, coaches guided, communities built venues in order to organize competitions. All Olympians stand on the shoulders of those who lifted them. We've already cheered the Olympians. Let's also cheer the parents, coaches and communities.

If the relay race teaches us how to achieve in sports, why don't the same dynamics apply to business, as President Obama has said?

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Vail Daily columnist Jack Van Ens: Is business success a sprint or a relay?