Loren Data Corp. Welcomes You To The New LD.COM

It’s been a long time coming, but the launch day of our new corporate website is here along with a fresh, new corporate branding. Huge thanks to Jamie Schwartzman and his creative team at Flux Branding .

First, the new brand for Loren Data at the top.

Since 1987 the Loren Data brand has stood for integrity, reliability and dedication to our customers. As we start into our 30th year, we continue to live by our founding principles.

Next, a new look for ECGrid, our premier EDI Interconnect Network since 2000. The ECGrid brand continues to stand for reliable core EDI messaging for the EDI service provider industry, including Cloud and SAAS providers, system integrators, VARs and consultants.

With ECGrid we leave the value added to the many talented companies out there who specialize in all sorts of technology and industry verticals. You can see a great example of those offerings on our new Enhanced Solutions page.

One thing we have learned in 16 years of running ECGrid is that Trading Partners Matter. Our new brand offering, Hubbub, is our gift to the EDI community. With a free account on Hubbub, any EDI user can manage their trading partner community setting up their own portal including contact information, listing VAN or Service Provider mailbox accounts and uploading their AS2 configuration data. The end user can then invite and share that information with their trading partner community – all for free.

Additionally and optionally, on Hubbub if you want a great hosted mailbox with unified VAN and AS2, harnessing all the reliability and power of ECGrid under the hood, for an amazing, great and honest price, you can set that up on Hubbub, too! It is just a click away.

With all that, I invite you to explore our new website at http://LD.com. Please comment and let me know what you think.

Kindest regards,

Todd

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Why Sarcastic People Are More Successful

Everybody just loves sarcasm. It’s so warm and fuzzy and makes everyone feel nice. So go ahead with those biting quips — they’ll definitely win you friends and admirers!

I’m being sarcastic, of course. Sarcasm, as we all know, might be occasionally hilarious (and often a pretty great way to vent your annoyance with the world), but it doesn’t exactly seem like a surefire strategy to build alliances and get ahead at work. In fact, most career coaches would probably tell you to avoid it at all costs at the office.

Except maybe they’re all totally wrong. That’s the suggestion of research on sarcasm that is bound to cheer fans of snarky comments everywhere. Apparently, sarcasm doesn’t just make you happy; it can also help you be more creative and successful.

“The highest form of intelligence.”

The study, titledThe Highest Form of Intelligence: Sarcasm Increases Creativity Through Abstract Thinking for Both Expressers and Recipients, was conducted by a team of researchers from Harvard, Columbia, and Insead. The team tested the effects of sarcasm by having volunteers engage in a sincere, a sarcastic, or a neutral (control) exchange before completing a task designed to assess their creativity.

What did the researchers find? Sarcasm, it turns out, is a pretty good mental workout. “To create or decode sarcasm, both the expressers and recipients of sarcasm need to overcome the contradiction (i.e., psychological distance) between the literal and actual meanings of the sarcastic expressions. This is a process that activates and is facilitated by abstraction, which in turn promotes creative thinking,” Harvard’s Francesca Gino, who participated in the study, explained in the Harvard Gazette.

The result was “those in the sarcasm conditions subsequently performed better on creativity tasks than those in the sincere conditions or the control condition. This suggests that sarcasm has the potential to catalyze creativity in everyone,” Adam Galinsky, another member of the research team, added. In short, sarcastic comments make your whole team more creative, so go ahead and let fly with the occasional snide-but-hilarious comment. Thanks, science!

Trust required.

That’s happy news for the more sarcastically inclined, but before you get carried away, the researchers caution that this finding shouldn’t be taken as a blank check to be sarcastic whenever and wherever the mood strikes you. If you don’t want to hurt people and burn bridges, you need to restrict your remarks to contexts where trust has already been established.

“While most previous research seems to suggest that sarcasm is detrimental to effective communication because it is perceived to be more contemptuous than sincerity, we found that, unlike sarcasm between parties who distrust each other, sarcasm between individuals who share a trusting relationship does not generate more contempt than sincerity,” Galinsky notes.

The Cookie Lady (a true story)

Central New England Railway Spring Tour 2016

This is a heads up for those planning to join us for the 2016 segment of annual bus tour along various portions of the former Central New
England Railway.

See a WebSite on this trip.

Waryas Park in
Poughkeepsie

Our trip will take place on Sunday April 3 starting at Waryas Park in
Poughkeepsie.  There is a parking lot on Water street just across from
the Metro North parking garage. within sight of the Hudson River and the Bridge. The buses cost less on Sunday and traffic is less at
least in the morning. It seems like the weather is better the first
weeks of April than March and that is another factor. Please notify your friends so that everyone who wants to go has a chance. The price will be $55 per person again.
This years trip will include the former railroad bridge ( now a Walkway) Poughkeepsie, The line from Highland to Maybrook and Campbell Hall. One of the stops will be the  restored Hopewell Junction and Museum. and  the newly built replica of the New Haven Switch ss 196.  Then return to Poughkeepsie. As usual lunch will be
provided. We have planned this trip to reach as many of the remaining historical spots as our intrepid scouts could locate. In many cases we have had to rely on photographs, new and old, to fill in
parts of the puzzle. We hope that you will gain a better understanding of the part that the railroads played in the history and development of York. As usual, everybody will get a copy of the 2016 CNE Tour guide We have a lot of ground to cover so we will have coffee and buses will roll at 9:00. Try to get there by 8:30 or earlier.

The cost of this year’s tour will be $55.00 per person and payment
should be made out to:
Joseph Mato CNE 2016
Joe Mato
62 Wood RD CNE 2016
Redding, CT 06896
(home): 203 938-9992     e-mail: joemato@sbcglobal.net
Be sure to include your E-Mail address so we can contact you if we need to. If you don’t have E-Mail then include your phone number.
Any money that is left after expenses will be used as “seed money” for
next years trip.
As we did last year, we have two buses with 47 seats each. In past years we sold all seats and had a waiting list so don’t wait too long to send in your reservation. Please note that any request for refunds must be received thirty (30) or more days in advance of the tour date. If you can find a replacement to take your bus seat, that’s OK just let us know who it is. We have to know who to let onto the bus when the tour starts. If you can’t find a replacement then we may have somebody on the waiting list to suggest but we can’t refund money that has already been spent on tour expenses.
Bernie Rudberg
7 Marion Ave.
Wappingers Falls, NY    Phone 845 221-9330
12590-6017       E-Mail Brudberg@optonline.net

Market Funk

Barataria - The work of Erik Hare

Watching the stock market on a daily basis is a good way to go insane. If you doubt this, all you have to do is read the various explanations for the daily gyrations – which rarely make much sense. Nevermind them. Since the start of 2016 the market’s been in a serious funk, which is to say it’s had a major urge to get down.

The official explanation is “China”. Something about China, at least. We’ve never bought that here at Barataria, focusing instead on the positive news that surrounds us every day. No, we’re not joking. There is indeed positive news and the market reflects this – sort of, at least.

Like good funk, the story of the stock market today comes with a backbeat and a solid bass line. It’s all about how the vagaries of international finance flow through the news and the market with a beat…

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10 Really Smart Things Successful Millennials Do

All those bad habits older people complain about? They’re actually kind of brilliant.

It’s time to stop whining about Millennials.

My company has grown a lot since 2014, and we’ve hired a lot more people. As we’ve done so, the average age has gone down. I’m a Gen-Xer; so are the CEO, COO, and a few other key people. But I think a majority of us now are Millennials.

Like everyone else, Millennials have their strengths and weaknesses. But after working in a Millennial-dominated company, I’ve developed a lot of respect for them. I’ve also learned that many of the things older people criticize this generation for are actually pretty smart.

Here are 10 admittedly broad generalizations about how Millennials work that I actually think the rest of us should emulate.

1. “They’re out for themselves.”

2. “They’re obsessed with technology.”

3. “They don’t know how to stick to their role.”

4. “They don’t pay their dues.”

5. “They think they’re experts.”

6. “They dress like they’re hanging out.”

7. “They think they define their roles.”

8. “They’re too sensitive.”

9. “They’re so presumptive.”

10. “They’re not loyal.”

Read the whole story

Why GE had to kill its annual performance reviews after more than three decades

The annual performance review has been a ubiquitous and generally loathed fixture of the corporate world for decades. But haters can rejoice: It’s finally starting to topple. The best part? Even the company that popularized the toughest form of formal annual review is moving away from them.

For decades, General Electric practiced (and proselytized) a rigid system, championed by then-CEO Jack Welch, of ranking employees. Formally known as the “vitality curve” but frequently called “rank and yank,” the system hinged on the annual performance review, and boiled the employees’ performance down to a number on which they were judged and ranked against peers. A bottom percentage (10% in GE’s case) of underperformers were then fired.

The company got rid of formal, forced ranking around 10 years ago. But now, GE’s in the middle of a far bigger shift. It’s abandoning formal annual reviews and its legacy performance management system for its 300,000-strong workforce over the next couple of years, instead opting for a less regimented system of more frequent feedback via an app. For some employees, in smaller experimental groups, there won’t be any numerical rankings whatsoever.

With the decision, GE joins other high-profile companies—like Microsoft, Accenture, and Adobe—that have started dumping or have already gotten rid of formal annual reviews. GE may not have invented stack ranking, but it’s the company most identified with it. And given the longstanding and pervasive influence GE has had over the business world, its move could represent the beginning of the end for a practice that has been at the heart of how corporations have managed people for many decades.

Picture Above:

Hallowed but shifting ground at GE’s Crotonville management training campus (General Electric)