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Executives at all levels would be more innovative and therefore successful if they approached problems the way designers do

understanding a problem or need from the consumer's point of view and then coming up with the best good or service for the job

If the federal government doesn't provide the state with an additional $6.9 billion requested by Schwarzenegger, the governor's budget calls for eliminating In-Home Supportive Services, CalWORKS welfare and Healthy Families programs, which provides services to millions of Californians.

"There are recommendations to cut more than $2.9 billion from social service programs," McIntosh said. "This action alone will further push families into poverty, putting them in a dire situation from which they may never recover."

Elimination of these programs will, in turn, impact other areas as well, including the criminal justice system, the homeless population and county welfare rolls. Elimination of the IHSS and CalWORKS programs would put 450,000 people out of work.

women are still under-represented at the top of companies. Only 2% of the bosses of America’s largest companies and 5% of their peers in Britain are women.

juggling work and child-rearing is difficult

Many women feel they have to choose between their children and their careers. Women who prosper in high-pressure companies during their 20s drop out in dramatic numbers in their 30s and then find it almost impossible to regain their earlier momentum. Less-skilled women are trapped in poorly paid jobs with hand-to-mouth child-care arrangements. Motherhood, not sexism, is the issue: in America, childless women earn almost as much as men, but mothers earn significantly less. And those mothers’ relative poverty also disadvantages their children.

the shift towards women is likely to continue: by 2011 there will be 2.6m more female than male university students in America.

All this argues, mostly, for letting the market do the work.

Norway has used threats of quotas to dramatic effect. Some 40% of the legislators there are women. All the Scandinavian countries provide plenty of state-financed nurseries. They have the highest levels of female employment in the world and far fewer of the social problems that plague Britain and America.

there are plenty of cheaper, subtler ways in which governments can make life easier for women

Some popular American charter schools now offer longer school days and shorter summer holidays.

While many Western countries experienced negative growth last year, China registered a jaw-dropping 8.7 per cent increase. Though much of it was achieved by a generous stimulus package, it maintained jobs and, in the end, helped fuel feelings of superiority.

Economic power is inexorably shifting away from the U.S. and towards China, he says, and coming with it is power and influence. "China is stronger now. It's more influential," says Yao. "And the Chinese banking sector looks better than the Western banking system."

"Saving face matters to the Chinese," he says. "But if you slap the Chinese face once, twice, three times, four times – that's too much." That language underlines the stark differences in the two nations' perception of issues such as Taiwan, Tibet and the Dalai Lama.

"China has risen to a different place. ... It's clearly an unsettling stage in U.S.-China relations, a new paradigm. No one is really sure how it's going to shake out."

When wealth is talked about in this context, it is often described as a pie. "You can't make the pie larger," say politicians. When you're talking about the amount of money in one family's bank account, or the amount available to a government from one year's tax revenue, this is true. If one person gets more, someone else has to get less.I can remember believing, as a child, that if a few rich people had all the money, it left less for everyone else. Many people seem to continue to believe something like this well into adulthood. This fallacy is usually there in the background when you hear someone talking about how x percent of the population have y percent of the wealth. If you plan to start a startup, then whether you realize it or not, you're planning to disprove the Pie Fallacy.What leads people astray here is the abstraction of money. Money is not wealth. It's just something we use to move wealth around. So although there may be, in certain specific moments (like your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth. Wealth has been getting created and destroyed (but on balance, created) for all of human history.Suppose you own a beat-up old car. Instead of sitting on your butt next summer, you could spend the time restoring your car to pristine condition. In doing so you create wealth. The world is-- and you specifically are-- one pristine old car the richer. And not just in some metaphorical way. If you sell your car, you'll get more for it.In restoring your old car you have made yourself richer. You haven't made anyone else poorer. So there is obviously not a fixed pie. And in fact, when you look at it this way, you wonder why anyone would think there was.