Sears: Growth as reuse

Sears Holdings is converting old Sears and Kmart properties into much needed data storage centers.

The department store chain owns 25 million square feet of space across 3,200 properties, with a store located within 10 miles of 71 percent of the U.S. population. With the formation of a new subsidiary, Ubiquity Holdings, Sears is seeking to outfit stores with racks of servers, forests of wireless towers on the rooftops leased to cell phone carriers, and in some cases, “business continuity facilities.” This is an emerging industry, providing temporary centers of operations and data recovery services for businesses that are forced out of their offices by a natural disaster or other disruption.

via Sears Turning Old Department Stores Into Data Centers | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

A good example of reuse.

Grit

Angela Lee Duckworth’s research at the U of Penn has begun to make a strong case against the usual success predictors in students and employees. These are things like test scores, IQ, and socioeconomics. The definitive variable is grit: the chemistry of passion and perseverance that makes people failure-resilient.

The good news is that passion can be learned as a tacit skill, beginning with teaching people how to dream in ways that are personally compelling and significant. An exciting trend in the data.

Angela Lee Duckworth: The key to success? Grit | Video on TED.com