Lessons from the 'World's Ugliest Woman': 'Stop Staring and Start Learning

By Lylah M. Alphonse

Lizzie Velasquez, author of Be Yourself, Be Beautiful.When she was in high school, Lizzie Velasquez was dubbed "The World's Ugliest Woman" in an 8-second-long YouTube video. Born with a medical condition so rare that just two other people in the world are thought to have it, Velasquez has no adipose tissue and cannot create muscle, store energy, or gain weight. She has zero percent body fat and weighs just 60 pounds.

In the comments on YouTube, viewers called her "it" and "monster" and encouraged her to kill herself. Instead, Velasquez set four goals: To become a motivational speaker, to publish a book, to graduate college, and to build a family and a career for herself.

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Now 23 years old, she's been a motivational speaker for seven years and has given more than 200 workshops on embracing uniqueness, dealing with bullies, and overcoming obstacles. She's a senior majoring in Communications at Texas State University in San Marcos, where she lives with her best friend. Her first book, "Lizzie Beautiful," came out in 2010 and her second, "Be Beautiful, Be You," was published earlier this month.

"The stares are what I'm really dealing with in public right now," she told Dr. Drew Pinsky in an interview on CNN's Headline News this week. "But I think I'm getting to the point where… instead of sitting by and watching people judge me, I'm starting to want to go up to these people and introduce myself or give them my card and say, 'Hi, I'm Lizzie. Maybe you should stop staring and start learning'."

Velasquez was born in San Antonio, Texas; she was four weeks premature and weighed just 2 pounds, 10 ounces. "They told us they had no idea how she could have survived," her mother, Rita, 45, told the Daily Mail. "We had to buy doll's clothes from the toy store because baby clothes were too big." Doctors warned Rita and her husband, Lupe, that their oldest child would never be able to walk or talk, let alone live a normal life. (Her two younger siblings were not affected by the syndrome.)

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Instead, she has thrived. Her internal organs, brain, and bones developed normally, though her body is tiny. Since she has no fatty tissue in which to store nutrients, she has to eat every 15 to 20 minutes to have enough energy to get through the day. One brown eye started clouding over when she was 4 years old, and now she's blind in that eye and has only limited sight in the other.

"Some days life doesn't make sense," she writes in "Be Beautiful, Be You." "You just have to change what you can, ask for help and pray about the rest."

She notes her triumphs and posts inspirational messages on Tumblr, and says that she's learned to embrace the things that make her unique. Instead of trying to retaliate against people who have made her feel badly, she sets goals for herself and pushes herself to succeed in spite of the haters. She's even reclaimed YouTube, video blogging about everything from bullying to hair-styling tips to staying positive.

"I feel really glad that I don't look like the celebrities out there that are so beautiful," she told Dr. Drew. "There's a lot of stereotypes attached to that." Not looking like a supermodel "gives people the opportunity to know you personally," she explains. "If they're willing to take that extra step they'll get to know the person you really are."

Of course, the horrible comments left on that old YouTube video stung (the video has since been removed, but Velasquez says she read every single comment). Now, she says, she understands that they're "just words."

"I'm human, and of course these things are going to hurt," she said. "Their judgements of me isn't who I am, and I'm not going to let these things define me."

"I didn't sink down to their level," she said in a follow-up video on YouTube last year. "Instead, I got my revenge through my accomplishments and determination. In the battle between the 'World's Ugliest Woman' video vs. me, I think I won."

Let the Pussy Riot go free

http://www.scribd.com/doc/105823936

Medvedev Says Rockers Have Served Enough Jail Time for Cathedral Performance

By ELLEN BARRY

MOSCOW — Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev said Wednesday that he believed that three female punk rockers jailed for a profane stunt in Moscow’s main Russian Orthodox cathedral should be released rather than serve out their two-year sentences, weighing in on a case that has drawn widespread condemnation in the West.
At a meeting with officials from United Russia, the pro-Kremlin party that he leads, Mr. Medvedev was careful to assure his audience that he did not approve of the women’s performance of an anti-Kremlin song at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, saying that even thinking about it made him nauseated.

But he went on to say that further incarceration would be “unproductive” — the most explicit commentary to come from a high-ranking official since the Aug. 17 sentencing.

“Imprisonment is a very severe — I would even say a frightening — responsibility,” Mr. Medvedev said. “What has already happened — that this well-known group of girls have been in prison quite a long time — is a very serious punishment for everything they did, regardless of the sentence.”

The six months they have already served, he said in remarks that were shown on television, is “fully enough to make them think about what happened, because of their stupidity or for some other reasons.”

“So prolonging their time in conditions of imprisonment seems not to be productive,” he added.

It is not clear whether Mr. Medvedev’s words will have any effect, but a lawyer for the punk rockers, who perform as Pussy Riot, said he thought that the Russian authorities might want to rid themselves of a case that has turned out to be more damaging than expected.

“In the end the authorities got themselves caught in a trap,” the lawyer, Nikolai Polozov, told the radio station Kommersant-FM. “The international community gives an unambiguous assessment of this case, and Russia’s reputation is rapidly falling, and the authorities are trying to find some solution so that they can emerge from this episode with a pretty face.”

Mr. Medvedev, who was president from 2008 until May, attracted support from urban liberals during his term, and his agreement to step down to make way for Vladimir V. Putin’s return as president helped set off protests last winter. He has said little about the raft of repressive measures introduced since he stepped down, or about Pussy Riot, which has been held up by pro-Kremlin commentators as an example of dangerous radicalism that has infected Russian society and must be stamped out.

A film that ran on Tuesday on the state-controlled Rossiya-1 channel asserted that Pussy Riot’s performance was planned and financed by an exiled tycoon, Boris Berezovsky, an enemy of Mr. Putin’s.

In August, shortly before the sentencing, Mr. Putin himself said he did not believe that the three women “should be judged too severely for this.” Though they could have received a sentence of as much as seven years, prosecutors requested a three-year sentence, and a judge gave them two.

Mr. Polozov noted that Mr. Medvedev had also taken a personal interest in the case of Taisia Osipova, the wife of an opposition activist who was charged with drug violations that her supporters said were trumped up.

Mr. Medvedev’s involvement evidently did her no good — a judge last month sentenced her to eight years in prison, double the time that prosecutors had requested.

“Obviously, you can’t say that the judge will do whatever Dmitri Anatolievich says,” he said. “But if the judge shares his opinion, obviously we would consider that a plus.”

San Fernando Valley Manufacturing Company and Its Owner Criminally Charged in Illegal Hiring Case

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

September 5, 2012

LOS ANGELES – Federal criminal charges have been filed against a Van Nuys manufacturing company and one of its owners for hiring unauthorized alien workers and repeatedly taking steps to cover up the illegal hiring in an effort to retain the workers.

Yoel A. Wazana, 38, owner and production manager of Wazana Brothers International, Inc., which does business under the name Micro Solutions Enterprises (MSE), is scheduled to make his initial appearance this afternoon in United States District Court in downtown Los Angeles.

In a plea agreement filed this afternoon in United States District Court, Wazana agreed to plead guilty to one felony count of false representation of a Social Security number. Wazana admits in the plea agreement that he caused two employees to use the Social Security numbers of relatives in order to remain in the firm’s employ after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) had begun an investigation of the company’s compliance with federal hiring laws.

Wazana Brothers International has agreed to plead guilty to one misdemeanor count of continuing employment of unauthorized aliens. In a plea agreement filed last month, the firm admits hiring approximately 55 unauthorized workers, and then continuing to employ them after the ICE inspection had begun. The company admits that it knew or deliberately avoided knowledge of the fact that the individuals were not authorized to work in the United States.

The company’s plea agreement represents a global settlement of criminal and civil charges against the firm. Under the terms of the plea agreement negotiated by ICE and the United States Attorney’s Office, Wazana Brothers International agreed to pay approximately $267,000 in civil and criminal fines.

Beyond the monetary sanctions, the plea agreement calls for the company to be on probation for three years, during which time it will implement a series of stringent measures to ensure it is complying with the nation’s hiring laws. Those steps include retaining an independent compliance monitor to oversee the completion and maintenance of the firm’s hiring records, and providing training to employees regarding federal hiring laws. The plea agreement takes into account the company’s willingness to take responsibility for its prior criminal conduct and to implement a rigorous program to ensure full compliance with federal hiring laws in the future.

“ICE is committed to holding businesses accountable when they knowingly hire or retain illegal workers,” said Claude Arnold, special agent in charge of HSI Los Angeles. “Employers who willfully violate our nation’s hiring laws gain an unfair economic advantage over their law abiding competitors. Our goal is to protect job opportunities for the nation’s legal workers and level the playing field for those businesses that play by the rules.”

The charges against Wazana and his company are the result of an investigation into MSE’s hiring practices that was initiated by ICE in 2007. According to court documents, shortly after MSE received notification in April 2007 that ICE planned to audit the company’s payroll and hiring records, Wazana directed that about 80 of MSE’s most experienced employees – at least 53 of whom did not have work authorization – be relocated to another manufacturing facility. When investigators requested hiring records from Wazana Brothers International on three separate occasions, the company failed to provide paperwork for those unauthorized workers. The plea agreements filed in this case also describe how, after learning of the ICE audit, Wazana conducted meetings with MSE’s assembly line workers, instructing them to obtain valid work authorization documents and return with those documents, suggesting that he did not care if the documents were actually theirs.

In February 2008, federal authorities executed a search warrant at MSE’s Van Nuys plant. During the enforcement operation, agents arrested eight current and former company workers on criminal charges and another 130 employees on administrative immigration violations.

The felony charge of false representation of a Social Security number carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Release No. 12-119

When was the last time you heard from East Timor?

Hillary Clinton in landmark East Timor visit

Mrs Clinton is the first top-level US diplomat to visit East Timor since its independence a decade ago

Hillary Clinton has made a landmark trip to East Timor following recent elections there - the first US secretary of state to do so since the country's independence in 2002.

Mrs Clinton said her visit was a sign of America's support for the country and its commitment to the region.
She also praised East Timor's progress and successful elections this year.
Mrs Clinton arrived in the capital Dili from China as part of an 11-day tour of six countries in Asia.
During her seven-hour visit, she met Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao and President Taur Matan Ruak.
She congratulated East Timor on "three sets of free and fair elections this year, and a peaceful transfer of power to a new president, government and parliament".
She said her visit signified "a clear, unmistakable message that the United States has been, is and will remain a resident Pacific power", but added US engagement with Asia was not about containing China.
"We happen to believe that Asia and the Pacific are big enough for many countries to participate in the activities of the region," AFP news agency quoted her as saying.
Asean hopes Her one-day visit has been seen as fostering the impoverished country's hopes of joining Asean.
East Timor applied to join Asean in March, but there has been concern that the country may still be too unstable to become part of the region bloc.
"It's put an enormous burden on Asean as a whole,'' a senior official travelling with Mrs Clinton told AFP. ''They really don't feel like Timor's ready and it needs much more help before it can play at a level that other countries can."
East Timor gained independence in 2002 after three years of UN administration, which followed more than two decades of bloody guerrilla warfare during Indonesian rule.
But an outbreak of gang violence in 2006 prompted the UN Security Council to set up a new peacekeeping force, Unmit.
Following the mostly peaceful presidential and general elections this year, the UN is due to withdraw its troops from the country by December.
East Timor's officials will be keen to use Mrs Clinton's trip as a way to boost the nation's profile, says the BBC's Karishma Vaswani in Jakarta.
Although rich with natural resources, Timor has struggled to raise the standard of living of its people, with an estimated 40% of Timorese still living below the poverty line, says our correspondent.

Trying To Tame The (Real) Deadliest Fishing Jobs

Trying To Tame The (Real) Deadliest Fishing Jobs by Curt Nickisch

• 

On the fishing-boat piers of New England, nearly everyone knows a fisherman who was lost at sea.
Boat captain Joe Neves remembers when a crew member got knocked overboard. "We heard him screaming 'Help me!' " Neves says, grimacing. "But you know, on the water at night, your head is like a little coconut." They didn't find him.
Mike Gallagher discovered a friend who was entangled in still-running hydraulics. "I knew right away he was dead," he says.
And Fred Mattera was fishing 125 miles off the coast of Cape Cod when the 21-year-old son of a close friend succumbed to poisonous fumes in a nearby boat. "That was a brutal week in this port," he says.
The Deadliest Catch
The Bureau of Labor Statistics ranks commercial fishing as the deadliest job in the United States. And despite the popular notion from reality TV's Deadliest Catch, which features Alaskan crab fishermen, the most dangerous American fishery is in the Northeast.
From 2000 to 2009, workers in the Northeast's multi-species groundfish fishery (which includes fish such as cod and haddock) were 37 times more likely to die on the job as a police officer.
A National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health report shows that 70 percent of those deaths and those in the second-deadliest fishery, Atlantic scallops, followed disasters such as a vessel catching fire, capsizing or sinking. Most of the rest came from onboard injuries or falling overboard — often caused by heavy overhead equipment.
Not one of those who fell overboard and drowned was wearing a life jacket.
An investigation by the Center for Public Integrity, NPR News and WBUR in Boston found that despite earning the odious ranking as America's deadliest job, commercial fishing in the Northeast operates in a cultural tradition and regulatory environment that thwarts promising safety measures.
Out To Sea, Out Of Mind
Despite the strikingly high fatality rate in the fishing industry, pushes for reform have taken decades to come to fruition. In 1988, Congress required fishing boats to carry life boats, personal flotation devices and other safety equipment.
Yet while the Coast Guard mandates seaworthiness inspections of passenger ferries and other commercial vessels, fishing boats are not inspected.
"We've ... requested authority to do inspections on vessels," says Jack Kemerer, chief of the fishing vessels division of the Coast Guard. Congress did not include that power in the U.S. Coast Guard Authorization Act of 2010.
"So I can't answer why or why not," Kemerer says. "But, you know, it's not that we haven't asked for it in the past."
The Last Of The Ocean Cowboys
Most fishermen don't want to be supervised. Some are fatalistic about their life on the seas. New England fishermen used to buy steel-toed boots, believing that if they fell into the frigid Atlantic, it was better to drown faster. Others espouse a rugged individualism and see themselves as the last cowboys on the ocean.
At Chatham Harbor on Cape Cod, Bill Amaru runs one of the last cod-fishing boats from a harbor that used to be so prolific, fish markets labeled cod Chathams. Now, strict federal rules limit how much he can catch. Many other cod fishermen have gone out of business. Amaru doesn't like the idea of the feds inspecting his boat.
"If there's a resentment to these kinds of rules," Amaru says as he moors his boat in the harbor, "it's based on the overall huge number of regulations that have come down on our industry in the last decade — so much federal 'nanny state,' kind of telling us how to operate — when I think I have a pretty good understanding of what I need to do to keep safe."
Still, the 2010 law requires boat owners like Amaru to prove that their safety equipment is up to date. Coast Guard checks have forced many fishermen to throw out old and disintegrating life rafts, and replace the expired batteries from their emergency signal beacons.
But just because a boat has updated safety gear doesn't mean the crew knows how to use it.
'We Will Make This A Safer Industry'
When Fred Mattera raced his boat to help fishermen overcome by poisonous fumes in a nearby boat in 2001, he didn't know exactly what to do to help them. The radio was no help, either.
"What I heard there was this hodgepodge [of] try this, try that," Mattera remembers. "And nobody knew for certain."
When 21-year-old Steven Follett, the son of a close friend, died, Mattera was frustrated. Some people in port called him a hero for trying. "Being a hero is ... someone survives," he says, shaking his head.
Mattera told his friend he would make good come from the loss of life. "I just said, I promise you, we need to change the culture. We will make this a safer industry."
The incident turned Mattera into a safety evangelist. Earlier this month, he helped the crews of two boats organize a disaster training and man-overboard exercise.
'Get Your Panic Out Now!'
In one exercise, crew members clumsily put on bright orange-red survival suits. Insulated, watertight and buoyant, the suits cover each fisherman from head to toe; only their faces are exposed. They step off the boat into the calm dockside water. But even in these conditions, wearing what some guys call a "Gumby suit" feels claustrophobic to some, and they thrash around until they get their bearings.
"Get your panic out now!" Fred Matter shouts from the deck. The crew members are practicing abandoning ship in the case of a fire or capsizing. The immersion suits are designed to keep them alive and afloat in the icy Atlantic until someone can rescue them.
Mattera coaches them to link up with each other back-to-back and paddle together over to a life raft and climb in.
When it's all over, the crew looks winded.
"There's a 'Holy crap!' issue to it," boat captain Norbert Stamps says of the training. "You jump in, you kind of realize that this isn't fun and games. This is real serious stuff. And you gotta practice, and you gotta know what to expect."
Crew member Mike Gallagher says fishermen-organized trainings are becoming more common. "To be honest with you," he says, "the safety thing hasn't really been paid much attention to until the past several years. Really, it's been overlooked."
Learning From Alaska
Alaskan waters had been viewed as the most hazardous place for commercial fishing — that is, until a closer focus on safety reduced the number of fatalities in those fisheries.
"I believe that fishermen want to be safe," says National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health epidemiologist Jennifer Lincoln, who's based in Alaska. "They just want things to be practical. They want the solutions to really address the hazards that exist."
In Alaska, fishermen, state regulators and the Coast Guard have worked together to make fishing less deadly:

• Bering Sea crabbing boats now transport fewer crab pots when they head out to sea. In turn, that weight limit prevented capsizing. Fatalities fell by 60 percent.
• Because capsizing often occurred in deaths of Alaska's salmon fishermen, skiff operators are now allowed the option of leaving immersion suits off their small boats, as long as they wear a life preserver at all times.
• Pilot projects with life preservers designed for their working conditions encouraged scallop boats to require crew members to wear them.

That kind of safety progress is what Fred Mattera and others want to replicate in the Northeast, the home of today's deadliest catch. Since that deadly accident in 2001, Mattera has trained hundreds of fishermen at Point Judith in Narragansett, R.I. But he's not done.
"I'm just a fisherman," Mattera says. "That's what I loved, and that's what I did for a long time. I promised a family we'd make a difference. [As long as] I'm still breathing, that's what we're going to strive to do."
Mattera hopes that someday, the deadliest job in America will only be as dangerous as it has to be, and not one bit more.
Our stories about dangers in the commercial fishing industry were jointly reported by the Center for Public Integrity, WBUR in Boston and NPR News. The stories are part of CPI's Hard Labor series on workplace safety.

U.S. says Hezbollah is helping Syrian regime

By Karen DeYoung and Anne Gearan, Published: August 10

The Obama administration charged Friday that Lebanon-based Hezbollah is directly assisting Syria’s brutal domestic military crackdown and announced new sanctions against the group and the government of President Bashar al-Assad. The announcements were timed to precede Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s meetings on Saturday with Syrian opposition leaders in Turkey. Clinton also plans to pledge an additional $5.5 million in U.S. humanitarian aid for Syrian refugees.

A look at the Syrian uprising one year later. Thousands of Syrians have died and President Bashar al-Assad remains in power, despite numerous calls by the international community for him to step down. Move could provoke a backlash from the military. The new measures are unlikely to placate Syrian rebel forces who have asked for U.S. military equipment and aerial protection in their increasingly bloody fight against Assad. Nor are they likely to please critics at home who say that President Obama is sitting on the sidelines of a humanitarian crisis and a battle that threatens U.S. security interests in the region, current and former U.S. officials said.
In sessions with Assad opponents and Turkish government leaders, Clinton plans to discuss options that do not go as far as direct U.S. intervention. The one-day stop follows her 10-day trip to Africa.
“She certainly will be looking to see whether there is anything else we can do that will have a positive impact rather than a detrimental impact on the overall situation in Syria,” a senior State Department official said Friday.
The cautious U.S. policy could change, as it did last year in Libya, despite the administration’s concern that adding arms to the volatile and increasingly sectarian civil war in Syria would only make things worse.
Clinton is looking for a “clear picture of the effectiveness of what we are currently providing and how it can be made more effective, and then whether or not there are additional things we can do,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss plans for the meetings.
But skepticism about the utility of any military assistance, a lack of international consensus and the upcoming U.S. presidential election make the possibility of any near-term military operation appear remote.
“I just don’t see it coming that fast, with or without the election,” another senior U.S. official said earlier this week, although that official and others agreed that domestic politics have complicated the response to the Syria crisis.
Amid fears that extremists are gaining strength within rebel ranks, some administration officials have argued internally that increased U.S. involvement would improve the likelihood of a democratic outcome and provide greater U.S. influence with the government that eventually replaces Assad. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has said the United States should work with allies who are already supplying weapons to the rebels.
Armed with some tanks and heavy weapons supplied by Persian Gulf states or captured from the Assad army, the rebels have made significant gains in recent days, although not enough to shift the military balance of the 17-month conflict. On Friday, rebel forces acknowledged losing ground in the face of heavy government bombardment in the city of Aleppo but said they were preparing a counterattack, Reuters reported.
Residents were reported to be streaming out of the city into suburbs and a newly opened corridor into Turkey that is said to be controlled by the opposition but still under government artillery and air attack.
Obama has not ruled out any options in Syria, but White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan said this week that opposition forces there are already “awash in weaponry.” There is little indication that a war-weary American public favors intervention in Syria.
</fb:like></span><span id=check-twitter> The United States holds no uniform view of Assad’s staying power, with estimates ranging up to many months if he retains enough loyalty in his armed forces. But the pace of defections from his government and the growing military ability of the rebels have hastened the need for planning to head off a chaotic collapse of basic services and to prevent a security vacuum, officials said.
The administration is trying to expand its contact with political opposition figures beyond expatriate groups that have so far failed to mobilize support in Syria. Officials would not provide details about Clinton’s planned meetings in Istanbul but said the meetings would include activists who recently fled Syria or who travel in and out of the country.
The new U.S. sanctions on Hezbollah are likely to have more symbolic than substantive effect. The Shiite militia, whose political wing dominates the government in neighboring Lebanon, has long been supported by Iran and Syria. The Treasury Department first designated Hezbollah a “Global Terrorist” group in 1995, prohibiting U.S. financial transactions with it and freezing its assets.
Treasury Undersecretary David Cohen said the new action, focused on activities specifically related to Syria, was “not solely focused on the immediate financial impact” but was designed “to expose” Hezbollah activity in that country.
“As the wave of revolt has spread across the Middle East,” Cohen said, “Hezbollah leadership has publicly supported some protests where it suited their needs, and in other cases, such as in Syria, it has actively supported the violent crackdown being carried out by the Syrian dictatorship.”
Cohen and Daniel Benjamin, the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator, declined to provide specifics about long-rumored Hezbollah participation in Assad’s military operation but said it included “extensive” logistical and operational support, as well as training and advice.
“This is not a matter of idle speculation or press reports,” Benjamin said.
“We’re obviously very sensitive here to issues of sources and methods,” he said, but added, “It’s safe to say that Hezbollah is playing a critical role in advising the Syrian government and its personnel in how to prosecute a counterinsurgency.”
Benjamin said that information had been compiled in an “authoritative document” distributed to other governments in hopes that they will take similar action against Hezbollah.
Separately, the administration imposed new sanctions on Syria’s state-run oil company, Sytrol, under the Iran Sanctions Act, which sharply limits energy-sector trade.
According to Treasury, Syrian shipments in April of 33,000 metric tons of gasoline to Iran — worth $36 million — benefited both countries, with Iran paying Syria with diesel fuel, used in military vehicles.
Since Syrian government entities are already subject to U.S. sanctions, the action primarily serves the broad purpose of drawing attention “to the really serious and deep relationships between the Iranian and Syrian regimes and the support that the Iranian regime has been providing to the Syrian government,” a senior administration official said.
Asked what the effect of the new actions would be, White House spokesman Jay Carney said, “The desired result is to continue to press the Assad regime, to continue to isolate it, and to expose the fact that Assad’s friends — and he has very few — are Iran and Hezbollah.”
Gearan reported from Accra, Ghana.

How can your small business create a strong corporate culture? Here are 10tips.

1. Take responsibility. Every business has a corporate culture-a collection of shared values, traditions and goals that make it unique. The difference is, strong corporate cultures arise consciously, shaped by the business owner, while weak ones arise accidentally from neglect.
2. Create a mission statement. Your company's mission statement, which clearly conveys your business's goals, philosophy and unique differentiators in a sentence or two, will be a reference point for developing and maintaining your corporate culture.
3. Keep it authentic. Corporate culture should be a natural outgrowth of your business's mission, your industry, your customers and even your personality. Don't try to "force" a corporate culture that's not authentic. IBM has one corporate culture; Zappos has a very different one. Each is authentic to the business involved.
4. Involve your team. Although you are a key driver of your business's corporate culture, that doesn't mean you can impose it from the top down. Involve your employees in fine-tuning your mission statement and determining what kind of culture they want to create.
5. Create rituals. Rituals, stories and rites of passage help create and sustain corporate culture. Whether it's a weekly Friday pizza lunch, a celebration for employees who reach certain milestones or just the stories you tell when you welcome new employees to the team, create rituals that convey your corporate culture.
6. Hire for fit. Look for job candidates whose personalities and attitudes mesh with your culture. Fit is more important than skill. A job candidate might have years of experience, but if he or she is uptight and rigid while your culture is loose and fun, the new hire won't be happy-and neither will you.
7. Express your corporate culture in everything you do. Everything from the design of your office or stores, to the appearance and tone of your marketing materials, to the way your employees interact with customers should clearly convey your corporate culture to the outside world.
      
8. Don't confuse "culture" with "crazy." Wacky corporate cultures get a lot of attention these days, but being zany on the outside doesn't mean slacking off. Build rigor, ethics and responsibility into your corporate culture to create a firm foundation for growth.
        
9. Check in periodically. Three out of four executives in an MWW Group survey say their corporate culture is the major driver of their business's reputation, but just 5 percent felt their company's culture was strong enough to prevent a reputational crisis. Assess your corporate culture periodically to make sure it's still working for your business.
      
10. Be ready to change. Nothing stays static in business today, and the corporate culture that works when your company is in the early stages may need to evolve as your business grows. If your corporate culture needs a tune-up, don't be afraid to make changes.