The excerpts put together below make Bob Kaplan’s speech music to our ears:

“The big deliverable coming from this risk management program is how important organizational culture and leadership are. (…) the first group of participants were surprised on how much time we spent more on culture and leadership issues than we did on technical issues. (…) the big difference between the successful and unsuccessful companies along this dimension is not that the successful ones had dramatically superior technical competence, (…) they recognized the importance of embedding the risk management function in the way they thought about their strategy, reviewed their strategy (…)”

Here’s the video (2:30):

Seth Godin: “A little empty”.

Om Malik (GigaOM): “Steve Jobs and the sound of silence”.

More at GigaOM: “Steve Jobs’ resignation: what the web is saying”. In one post, reactions from Marc Benioff, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jim Cramer, Walt Mossberg and others.

Even though he said in the resignation letter that he intends to stay on as Chairman, publications are booming with “the man and his legacy”-type stories. One that’s full of videos, interactive features and opinions is this Wall Street Journal piece.

April 2011 profile on Bridgewater and Ray Dalio – New York magazine. Yes, there’s New York and there’s New Yorker…

March 2011 story on Absolute Return – $1,990 annual subscription required to see the archives. Free trial only lets you see the current issue for 14 days.

Back to the study, whose abstract can be found here: they also looked at >45,000 NCAA (US college-level basketball) games and found the same effect, albeit smaller.

The hypotheses to explain these findings were loss aversion and diminishing sensitivity: that is, losing by 1 point made teams seek to reverse the situation and losing by a “lot” made teams care less or subjectively try less hard as those losing by 1 point, tied or winning. The researchers then devised a “game” to test subjects’ motivation in similar situations and they did find that those losing by little increased their efforts.

Even more interesting is the finding that people with higher confidence in themselves increased their efforts more than those with less confidence. In the article’s own words: “Being slightly behind won’t increase motivation if you think you’re not capable of turning things around. And, similarly, a large deficit might also be motivating if you think you’ve got what it takes to stage a glorious comeback.”

Motivation isn’t an easy issue – not even as a study field – so it’s only natural that it seems so hard to instill it in oneself and/or others. When you mix the issue with confidence, it’s hard to know what comes first – this study seems to say that confidence is the fertile ground for motivation.

Here’s a series of charts by the New York Times showing how GE works its magic:

NYT charts on GE's tax "voodoo"

As the NYT said:

We’ve stumbled upon a series of videos by Bloomberg Television on Game Changers, and the first episode we saw is fantastic and profiles Steve Jobs. There are many interesting moments and lessons, but one that stuck with us is about the power of ideas and the inspiration/ motivation they bring – not just to potential customers but, in Apple’s case at a time when morale was at the lowest point, also internally. That’s when the team finally “awoke” and all that brilliance in engineering/ product design/ marketing was brought together to create, as a VC says in the video, “the greatest comeback in corporate history”.

We also highlight two groundbreaking and extremely timely TV spots that changed Apple’s history – and more.

Bloomberg Game Changers, Episode 2: Steve Jobs (47:39)

The 1984 Macintosh launch spot on Superbowl Sunday, 1984. Directed by Ridley Scott and shown just on that occasion, it’s considered one of the best TV ads of all time:

This is a pearl of a video. A 1983 Steve Jobs keynote explains the “1984″ ad context – and then shows it to a spellbound audience of (admittedly) Apple fans:

The second TV ad is “Here’s to the crazy ones”, and came at a time when Apple was in trouble and Steve Jobs had just been brought back as interim CEO. As one guy argues in the Bloomberg video, it’s almost as if the ad was directed more for the people at Apple than for the “outsiders”.

Finally: Steve Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005. Brilliant.

UPDATE: we received requests and suggestions by our readers, so we post two new and impressive videos:

A young Steve Jobs introduces the Macintosh in 1984 (5:11):

This is another version of the 1983 keynote we have already posted above, but after that part there’s a skilfully-edited section of the TV coverage of the Mac launch at the time. Very interesting stuff (9:55):

“(…) Buffett undoubtedly told Lubrizol that he would refuse to participate in an auction. And here is where you see Buffett’s cleverness at work. He puts his targets in a dilemma that really only has one answer:  take the price that looks very good or let Buffett walk away. Buffett’s real genius is a mix of these tactics and his ability to identify undervalued companies combined with the courage to act quickly on his analysis. That mix has been a recipe for big profits for Berkshire.”

The last paragraph, albeit unfair and simplistic, quite honestly still sounded like music to our ears.

“So this is how the Oracle works. He pays a fair price. He refuses to permit his bid to be shopped. He makes his bid very attractive to management, which discourages them from suggesting alternative transactions. He allows a reasonably fair post-signing opportunity for a topping bid—keeping a leg up against other bidders and, in this case, a fat $200 million breakup fee if he gets topped. And, if he is true to form, he gets a bargain.”

Second, Dealbook today highlighted an interesting story on Jeffrey Kaplan, who for 24 years was involved with M&A – including some of the largest deals such as HCA (the $33 bi LBO, not the recent IPO). The Deal Magazine interviews Mr. Kaplan and it’s an interesting inside view on M&A, private equity, even debt markets.

First, we know by covering the company that Laureate, as the Brazilian CEO Luis López says in the article, really does focus on assets of higher quality than those currently operated or sought out by most of the Brazilian listed players in the field. We’ve even visited some of those colleges run by Mr. López at a time when the Mexican and Chilean operations were the company’s largest and best. In fact, when Mr. López started running the Brazilian operations, we saw it as a telling sign of Brazil’s importance to the group.

That fact combined with the company’s declared spend amount and mandate could make acquisition prices soar, even though the company focuses on assets that may not be on the local players’ sights. Think of Laureate’s growth-by-M&A focus as a tide that could lift all ships. What’s more, the tide must already be pretty high given that listed Brazilian players have been raising capital and expanding their war chests with the very specific mandate of delivering growth by acquisitions…

The point? Paraphrasing that famous question: “At what price growth?”