Success for “Provenance Revealed: Galerie Steinitz”

London – The innovative sale Provenance Revealed: Galerie Steinitz more than doubled its pre-sale estimate, realising a total of £6,299,640 / $7,131,192 / €7,187,889, on 21 September at Christie’s headquarters in London. Selling 89% by value, each lot was registered and secured on the Blockchain through Artory – a notable first for Classic Art. For this celebration of great provenances and craftsmanship, Christie’s partnered with Benjamin Steinitz, the internationally renowned dealer of 18th and 19th century furniture and sculpture, to advance the trade of decorative arts to a sophisticated new realm. The sale was led by two pairs of timeless Empire white marble demi-lune console tables, circa 1805, which realised £730,800 / $827,266 / €833,843 and £693,000 / $784, 476 / €790,713 respectively, each selling for many times their pre-sale estimates (estimate for each pair: £100,000-200,000, example illustrated above). Both pairs were originally supplied to the Villa Reale di Marlia home of Elisa Bonaparte, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, (1777-1820). Almost half of the sale sold for over the high estimate, with other important lots including Narcissus contemplating his image in the water, Paris school, mid-18th century, which was formerly in the celebrated collection of Louis-Antoine Crozat (1699-1770), Baron de Thiers–son of the financier Antoine Crozat who was considered the ‘richest man in France’. The marble realised £604,800 / $684,634 / €690,077 against an estimate of £100,000 to £150,000. Each lot included a secure, encrypted certificate of the sale for the successful bidder, providing a permanent digital record of the information about the artwork.

Parliament requests more support for regions to make energy transition a success

MEPs adopted Parliament’s position on the Commission proposal on the JTF with 417 votes in favour, 141 against and 138 abstentions.Parliament insisted on a substantial increase in JTF resources from the EU budget for 2021-2027 (EUR 25 billion in 2018 prices compared to EUR 11 billion proposed by the Commission and the decrease to EUR 7,5 billion agreed by the European Council). This amount should be supplemented by EUR 32 billion in current prices, as proposed under the EU Recovery Instrument.Moreover, MEPs confirmed key provisions outlined in the draft recommendations by the Regional Development Committee: Providing support to people, the economy and the environment, Creation of a “Green Rewarding Mechanism”, allowing 18% of the total JTF resources to be allocated to member states that reduce their greenhouse gas emissions more quickly than others

• • A share of 1% of the total amount will be allocated for islands, and 1% for the outermost regions,
  • A co-financing rate of up to 85% of costs for eligible projects across the EU,
  • Possibility to transfer resources from other cohesion funds on a voluntary basis,
  • Broadening the scope to include microenterprises, sustainable tourism, social infrastructure, universities and public research institutions, energy storage technologies, low-emission district heating, smart and sustainable mobility, digital innovation, including digital and precision farming, projects fighting energy poverty, as well as culture, education and community building,
  • A derogation for investments in activities related to natural gas, for regions heavily reliant on the extraction and combustion of coal, lignite, oil shale or peat, if they qualify as “environmentally sustainable” in accordance with the Taxonomy Regulation and comply with six additional cumulative conditions.
    In addition, only 50% of the national allocation will be available for countries which have not yet committed to a 2050 national target for climate neutrality, until such a target is adopted.

Aegean Plan: Europe’s biggest success – and its failure

Exactly four years ago, on 20 March 2016, the implementation of the so-called the EU-Turkey agreement, began. So did the confusion surrounding it, which meant that Marine Le Pen and Amnesty International, the AfD and Pro Asyl all opposed it.
In fact, this “agreement” is no more than a press statement. It is no legal text. It changes no existing international or EU laws. Its effectiveness relied from the very beginning on one thing only: that both sides – the EU and Turkey – would act as they promised, because of their own interests. When one of the two partners no longer sees an interest in cooperation, the statement would vanish. And yet, it worked for four years.Strikingly this EU-Turkey Statement turned into the most effective expression of moral realism in EU migration management in the past four years. It had a dramatic impact. It sharply reduced irregular migration across its South-eastern external borders without undermining the individual right to asylum. It sharply reduced numbers of deaths in the Aegean. It helped millions of refugees in Turkey gain access to education and health care. At the same time, it was never properly implemented on the Greek islands, not because this was not possible – what needed to be done was obvious already before it was adopted in March 2016 – but because the success in reducing numbers of arrivals meant that both the EU and the previous Greek government in Athens no longer paid much attention to its implementation on the islands. This came at the expense of asylum seekers and the Greek islands. And this has now come back to haunt Greece.

Best’s Special Report: Takaful in the MENA Region: Finding the Right Ingredients for Success

A.M. Best believes there are significant opportunities for takaful operators in most Middle East and North Africa (MENA) markets to provide sound financial protection that is in line with consumers’ religious sensibilities, taking into account the huge global Muslim population. However, these opportunities continue to remain disappointingly unrealised, with takaful companies struggling to establish strong business profiles.In a new Best’s Special Report, titled, “Takaful in the MENA Region: Finding the Right Ingredients for Success”, A.M. Best states due to a lack of sufficient differentiation, takaful providers remain subject to fierce price competition with larger, more established insurers that already benefit from greater brand awareness and established distribution networks. Furthermore, additional support from shari’a scholars in promoting Islamic financial products is essential for the growth of the takaful sector.Salman Siddiqui, associate director, said: “Given the proportion of Muslims in the MENA region, A.M. Best considers the take-up of shari’a-compliant insurance to be disappointing, especially in contrast with the Malaysian experience, which exhibits higher takaful penetration – despite the country having a lower proportion of Muslims. With the exception of Saudi Arabia, where all insurers operate under the unified co-operative insurance model, which is distinctly different from the traditional takaful model, most of the remaining Middle Eastern takaful operators have struggled to establish competitive positions in their respective markets.”The report examines market trends including merger and acquisition activity and notes despite some market consolidation, the business profiles of the majority of takaful companies remain limited. A.M. Best considers the Middle East insurance markets to be concentrated and generally a few large players dominate their respective markets, with the other market participants competing for the remaining premium.Mahesh Mistry, senior director, analytics, said: “Operators with strong business profiles and track records of good operating performance are able to attain higher credit ratings from A.M. Best. Conversely, those who struggle in establishing their franchises, and suffer from poor performance find it harder to attain strong credit ratings. Additionally, a number of takaful companies have had difficulties in meeting minimum solvency rules, which has also led to lower credit ratings.”

NewVoiceMedia Strengthens Leadership Team with Appointment of SVP Customer Success

London. NewVoiceMedia, a leading global provider of cloud contact center and inside sales technology that enables businesses to have more successful conversations, has appointed Chris Haggis as senior vice president of customer success to strengthen its customer service delivery and support functions.
Based in the UK, Chris will have global responsibility for NewVoiceMedia’s customer success and professional services functions. He brings two decades of engineering experience to the role, including more than five years at NewVoiceMedia, joining to establish the company’s global functions for sales engineering, professional services and, most recently, customer success managers. Prior to that, he served as head of E2E engineering at Barclays and services director at Datapoint.The new position is the latest milestone in NewVoiceMedia’s continued rapid global expansion, closely following its reported international bookings growth of 55 percent in FY 2017 and position in the Forbes Cloud 100, the publication’s annual list of the top 100 private cloud companies in the world. The company now serves more than 650 customers spanning six continents including MobileIron, Lumesse, Vax, FlixBus, JustGiving and Canadian Cancer Society. Its cloud contact center and inside sales platform delivers more successful conversations to help organizations worldwide build a more personal relationship with every customer and prospect.Dennis Fois, president and COO at NewVoiceMedia, commented, “It gives me great pleasure to welcome Chris to this role and congratulate him on his well-deserved promotion. This is a great example of career progression at the company and an important leadership role which will ensure we are truly customer-centric in our delivery and support functions, enabling us to continue our rapid international growth with our customers at the very heart of everything we do. Chris will be extremely valuable to the business as we continue to accelerate the scale of our global operations while ensuring customer satisfaction. We look forward to his contribution to NewVoiceMedia’s future.”Chris added, “I’m very excited to join NewVoiceMedia’s leadership team and support our continued growth while ensuring a smooth transition for our global customer base through the onboarding process and delivery of the best possible customer support.”For more information about NewVoiceMedia, visit http://www.newvoicemedia.com.

Creating your own success story with a new Global MBA

London. A new Global MBA, developed around an extensive range of specialisms in Law, Finance, Entrepreneurship & Innovation, Accountancy and Leadership, has been launched by the University of London and Queen Mary University of London (QMUL).The Global MBA comes with professional accreditations from major international bodies, including the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) and the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA), allowing students to present themselves for professional recognition on successful completion of the award. A significant feature of the programme is a business simulation enabling students to apply key concepts to real world problems.This innovative award has been designed specifically for career professionals, and provides considerable flexibility in both mode and place of study, while offering students four entry and examination points per year. This will help students to successfully combine work and study. Learning materials and online tools, specially designed for the Global MBA, will equip students to understand and address the enormous challenges that face today’s global business leaders.Professor Sir Adrian Smith FRS, Vice-Chancellor, University of London, said: ‘This is a very exciting new programme being delivered through the University of London. It’s current, it’s relevant, and it meets the needs of career professionals and employers in a broad range of sectors.’ He added: ‘This programme is also unique in that we have collaborated with professional organisations of the highest international standing. These organisations will provide our students with huge benefits by securing their ongoing personal and professional development.’ Dr Mary Stiasny OBE, Pro Vice-Chancellor (International), University of London, said: ‘With the academic expertise provided by an internationally acclaimed faculty from QMUL, and our experience in delivering quality academic awards across the world since 1858, we believe this programme will enrich the working lives of the diverse array of professionals who choose to enrol on this programme, and their employers across the world.’ Professor Ioannis Kokkoris, Programme Director for the Global MBA, QMUL, said: ‘Whether it is the case of advancing your career, switching to another industry or starting your own business – the University of London Global MBA will give you the confidence, the skills and the connections to create your own success story.’ Applications for the Global MBA open on the 9th January 2017, and students are given the flexibility to pay per module rather than all at once. Students without all the entry qualifications will be able to take an online ‘International Business Essentials’ module and, on successful completion, this may contribute to them becoming eligible to apply for the Global MBA. Other postgraduate awards from this programme (at diploma and certificate level) are also available for students wishing to gain a general or specialist qualification. (photo: university of london)

Strike it lucky – the role luck plays in business success

Managers and stakeholders are seriously underestimating the role luck plays in the success, or failure, of a business according to a new study into luck.Despite their best efforts, individuals and organisations can find it difficult to predict the consequences of their initiatives according to Chengwei Liu, Associate Professor of Strategy and Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School.“While people appreciate the role of bad luck in failures, they do not necessarily do the same when it comes to explaining success,” said Dr Liu. “Explaining this asymmetry has important implications for organisational learning, executive compensation and responsibility allocation.“Our review suggests managers and their stakeholders tend to develop illusions that the world is more controllable and predictable than it actually is, and these illusions can entail costly errors in modern societies.“This is the bad news. The good news is we have the conceptual tools to help us to better understand the role of luck in organisational life, and thus to counter these illusions.”In the paper Good Night, and Good Luck: Perspectives on Luck in Management Scholarship Dr Liu and Mark de Rond from Cambridge Judge Business School argue bestselling books on management and case studies in business school education focusing on the top performers and how to move from ‘good to great’ are taking the wrong approach.“Perspectives on luck suggest there are no rules for becoming the richest and luck dominates the outcome beyond a certain level, “added Dr Liu. “This implies that preaching how to move from good to great is likely to lead to disappointment or even encourage excessive risk taking, fraud even, because exceptional performances are unlikely to be achieved otherwise.“Instead, management research and education should focus more on less extreme performances, that is, the second best, and strive to increase learning from failures, where skill and effort matter more in determining outcomes.“We should stop showing our students how a limited number of stars have risen to levels that others are unlikely to achieve. Rather we should present more realistic and potentially beneficial lessons such as how people can move from incompetent to okay.”
Dr Liu reviewed 1,979 papers mentioning the term luck or chance published in six leading management journals management from 1950 to 2015. The five areas of luck the research examined are: luck as attribution, luck as randomness, luck as attribution, luck as counterfactual, luck as undeserved and luck as serendipity.But the paper goes one step further and suggests luck may also be one possible solution to the problem of increasing social inequality: luck as a Leveller.This idea originates from the ancient Greek and Venetian Republic, known as Demarchy or Lottocracy, where political leaders were elected not by merit but selected at random.“Random selection is particularly relevant for evaluating exceptional successes, including those of star performers in corporate life,” said Dr Liu.“As we have seen there may only be small differences in skill among corporate stars which, in turn, would seem to imply that beyond a certain corporate level, randomly selected executives are likely to perform as well as their higher performing counterparts.
“The firm may well spend the additional resources made available from this approach for more useful applications such as research and development.”However Dr Liu does appreciate the difficulties such a process could bring about, including confidence in a leaders’ ability to direct their efforts in the best possible way.“Lack of confidence in leadership might, in turn, become a self-fulfilling prophecy, causing firms to underperform,” said Dr Liu.“Assuming that the damages resulted from overconfidence is greater than that from under confidence, luck as leveller can still work well. Thus, randomly selecting executives from a pool of qualified candidates is more effective than selecting the highest performers, and this is particularly effective for the highest ranked corporate positions such as CEOs.”As counterintuitive as it sounds, applying a contrarian approach by randomly (and secretly) picking your next CEO may well give your firm a competitive edge against others.”

“Breaking the code: a pathway to success”

Torino. Lunedì 19 ottobre inizierà la sessione italiana del progetto, che si protrarrà fino a domenica 25 ottobre, e alle 9 nell’aula magna del liceo Giordano Bruno (Via Marinuzzi 1) avrà luogo la cerimonia inaugurale, alla presenza – oltre che delle rappresentanze delle altre quattro scuole europee – della consigliera metropolitana delegata all’istruzione Domenica Genisio.
Il gruppo di lavoro comprende oltre quaranta docenti e più di duecento studenti dei cinque paesi.Le attività didattiche della settimana coinvolgeranno gruppi composti da ragazzi e professori delle diverse nazionalità, che comunicheranno tra loro in inglese, e riguarderanno le materie scientifiche (matematica, fisica, scienze e Ict) insieme a quelle geografiche e storiche e le scienze motorie.
Gli studenti e gli insegnanti svolgeranno gare di problem solving e giochi didattici (gymkana e caccia al tesoro, attività motorie, reinterpretazioni fotografiche e altro). Si svolgeranno inoltre uscite sul territorio per permettere agli ospiti di conoscere gli aspetti salienti del nostro territorio e i suoi principali monumenti.
L’obiettivo è quello di ideare, implementare e monitorare nuove strategie per motivare gli studenti, migliorarne l’impegno e aiutarli a innalzare le loro competenze in ambito scientifico e comunicativo, in linea con gli standard internazionali di Europa 2020”.
Il progetto del liceo Giordano Brunosi è classificato quarto a livello nazionale sui 45 approvatiper l’Italia dalla Commissione Europea.

IKEA Switzerland is the First Company

The vision of IKEA is to create a better everyday life for the many people, which includes the IKEA co-workers around the world. For years IKEA Switzerland has been committed to establishing gender equality amongst its 3000 co-workers. “With the EDGE certification we have the opportunity to verify whether our ambition to treat men and women equally at IKEA is a living reality,” says Simona Scarpaleggia, CEO of IKEA Switzerland. “By reaching the highest level of certification, we are tightening IKEA’s company structure and culture to prevent pay gaps, underrepresentation of women in management positions and different career paths for women,” Scarpaleggia continues. More than 100 companies from 31 different countries have been certified or are in the process of becoming certified by EDGE for the first or second level so far.The EDGE assessment included company statistics, interviews with more than 1000 employees and in-depth interviews with IKEA Switzerland’s HR professionals. The analysis of salaries has shown that IKEA has a statistically insignificant unexplained gender pay gap.
“IKEA Switzerland is the success story of gender-enlightened, sustainable business,” says Aniela Unguresan, co-founder of EDGE Certified Foundation.

Narang Medical Limited Believes That Customer Satisfaction is the key to Success

SAN DIEGO (Jan. 26, 2009) Orthopedic surgeon Capt. Dana Covey, chairman of Orthopedic Surgery at Naval Medical Center San Diego, performs a postoperative range of motion test at the orthopedic sports clinic. Covey is recipient of the first Col. Brian Allgood, M.D. Military Orthopedic Leadership Award from The Society of Orthopedic Surgeons. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Jake Berenguer/Released) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

New Delhi, (PRNewswire) “Narang Medical Limited Believes That Customer Satisfaction is the key to Success” issued on 4 May 2012 04:09 GMT, by Narang Medical Limited over PR Newswire, we are advised by a representative of the company that the links to the video have been displayed incorrectly. The correct URL should be http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4jN3P__Ym0&feature=youtu.be Complete, corrected release follows:Headquartered in India,one of the world’s largest democracies, Narang Medical Limited today is one of the most sought after exporters of hospital furniture and orthopedic implants. Product quality, prompt delivery, a customer oriented approach and technically qualified people are some of the unique selling propositions of the organization.”We have been doing business with Narang Medical for quite a few years now. We are very happy with the products of Narang Medical which are of good quality and are available at a very competitive price level,” said Mr. Henk, Project Manager, of a Dutch Company CEDI” and that’s why we come back to them every time.”
Credibility of a manufacturer can be assessed when the product manufactured by them is ordered from across the world. Narang Medical Limited is regularly catering to international government agencies, UN Bodies and health ministries of Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Netherlands, Kenya, South Africa and Qatar.The organization is serving customers worldwide, in more than 80 countries. The NET brand of medical products from Narang Medical Limited is very popular amongst the medical fraternity in various parts of the world.Sherif Khaleed,M.D, Orthopedic Surgeon, from Egypt said, “This is to certify that the NET Orthopedic Products are of good quality, meet all the standards of orthopedic implants and are satisfactory for my practice.”Since its establishment, the company has made its standing for delivering customer satisfactory medical products. Ideology for success at Narang Medical is the satisfaction of the end user.
Started as an enterprise in early 1950s, Narang Medical Limited has evolved as India’s most reputed manufacturer and exporter of Medical Equipment, hospital Furniture, Orthopedic Implants and Instruments. Company conforms to ISO and CE standards, and is a Star Export House company certified by the Government of India. For further information visit http://www.narang.com