Sunday, October 5, 2008
Good One liners...
[1] Regular naps prevent old age, especially if you take them while driving.
[2] Having one child makes you a parent; having two you are a referee.
[3] Marriage is a relationship in which one person is always right and the other is the husband!
[4] I believe we should all pay our tax with a smile. I tried - but they wanted
cash
[5] A child's greatest period of growth is the month after you've purchased new school uniforms.
[6] Don't feel bad. A lot of people have no talent
[7] Don't marry the person you want to live with, marry the one you cannot live without, but whatever you do, you'll regret it later.
[8] You can't buy love, but you pay heavily for it
[9] Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.
[10] Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired.
[11] Marriage is give and take. You'd better give it to her or she'll take it anyway.
[12] My wife and I always compromise. I admit I'm wrong and she agrees with me.
[13] Those who can't laugh at themselves leave the job to others.
[14] Ladies first. Pretty ladies sooner.
[15] A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.
[16] You're getting old when you enjoy remembering things more than doing them.
[17] It doesn't matter how often a married man changes his job, he still ends up with the same boss.
[18] Real friends are the ones who survive transitions between address books.
[19] Saving is the best thing. Especially when your parents have done it for you.
[20] Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools talk because they have to say something
[21] They call our language the mother tongue because the father seldom gets to speak!
[2] Having one child makes you a parent; having two you are a referee.
[3] Marriage is a relationship in which one person is always right and the other is the husband!
[4] I believe we should all pay our tax with a smile. I tried - but they wanted
cash
[5] A child's greatest period of growth is the month after you've purchased new school uniforms.
[6] Don't feel bad. A lot of people have no talent
[7] Don't marry the person you want to live with, marry the one you cannot live without, but whatever you do, you'll regret it later.
[8] You can't buy love, but you pay heavily for it
[9] Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.
[10] Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired.
[11] Marriage is give and take. You'd better give it to her or she'll take it anyway.
[12] My wife and I always compromise. I admit I'm wrong and she agrees with me.
[13] Those who can't laugh at themselves leave the job to others.
[14] Ladies first. Pretty ladies sooner.
[15] A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.
[16] You're getting old when you enjoy remembering things more than doing them.
[17] It doesn't matter how often a married man changes his job, he still ends up with the same boss.
[18] Real friends are the ones who survive transitions between address books.
[19] Saving is the best thing. Especially when your parents have done it for you.
[20] Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools talk because they have to say something
[21] They call our language the mother tongue because the father seldom gets to speak!
Saturday, October 4, 2008
A Leader Should Know How to Manage Failure (Former President of India APJ Abdul Kalam at Wharton India Economic forum, Philadelphia, March 22, 2008)
Question: Could you give an example, from your own experience, of how leaders should manage failure?
Kalam: Let me tell you about my experience. In 1973 I became the project director of India's satellite launch vehicle program, commonly called the SLV-3. Our goal was to put India's "Rohini" satellite into orbit by 1980. I was given funds and human resources -- but was told clearly that by 1980 we had to launch the satellite into space. Thousands of people worked together in scientific and technical teams towards that goal.
By 1979 -- I think the month was August -- we thought we were ready. As the project director, I went to the control center for the launch. At four minutes before the satellite launch, the computer began to go through the checklist of items that needed to be checked. One minute later, the computer program put the launch on hold; the display showed that some control components were not in order. My experts -- I had four or five of them with me -- told me not to worry; they had done their calculations and there was enough reserve fuel. So I bypassed the computer, switched to manual mode, and launched the rocket. In the first stage, everything worked fine. In the second stage, a problem developed. Instead of the satellite going into orbit, the whole rocket system plunged into the Bay of Bengal.
It was a big failure.
That day, the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, Prof.Satish Dhawan, had called a press conference. The launch was at 7:00 am, and the press conference -- where journalists from around the world were present -- was at 7:45 am at ISRO's satellite launch range in Sriharikota [in Andhra Pradesh in southern India]. Prof. Dhawan, the leader of the organization, conducted the press conference himself. He took responsibility for the failure -- he said that the team had worked very hard, but that it needed more technological support. He assured the media that in another year, the team would definitely succeed. Now, I was the project director, and it was my failure, but instead, he took responsibility for the failure as chairman of the organization.
The next year, in July 1980, we tried again to launch the satellite -- and this time we succeeded. The whole nation was jubilant. Again, there was a press conference. Prof. Dhawan called me aside and told me, "You conduct the press conference today."
I learned a very important lesson that day. When failure occurred, the leader of the organization owned that failure. When success came, he gave it to his team. The best management lesson I have learned did not come to me from reading a book; it came from that experience.
Kalam: Let me tell you about my experience. In 1973 I became the project director of India's satellite launch vehicle program, commonly called the SLV-3. Our goal was to put India's "Rohini" satellite into orbit by 1980. I was given funds and human resources -- but was told clearly that by 1980 we had to launch the satellite into space. Thousands of people worked together in scientific and technical teams towards that goal.
By 1979 -- I think the month was August -- we thought we were ready. As the project director, I went to the control center for the launch. At four minutes before the satellite launch, the computer began to go through the checklist of items that needed to be checked. One minute later, the computer program put the launch on hold; the display showed that some control components were not in order. My experts -- I had four or five of them with me -- told me not to worry; they had done their calculations and there was enough reserve fuel. So I bypassed the computer, switched to manual mode, and launched the rocket. In the first stage, everything worked fine. In the second stage, a problem developed. Instead of the satellite going into orbit, the whole rocket system plunged into the Bay of Bengal.
It was a big failure.
That day, the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, Prof.Satish Dhawan, had called a press conference. The launch was at 7:00 am, and the press conference -- where journalists from around the world were present -- was at 7:45 am at ISRO's satellite launch range in Sriharikota [in Andhra Pradesh in southern India]. Prof. Dhawan, the leader of the organization, conducted the press conference himself. He took responsibility for the failure -- he said that the team had worked very hard, but that it needed more technological support. He assured the media that in another year, the team would definitely succeed. Now, I was the project director, and it was my failure, but instead, he took responsibility for the failure as chairman of the organization.
The next year, in July 1980, we tried again to launch the satellite -- and this time we succeeded. The whole nation was jubilant. Again, there was a press conference. Prof. Dhawan called me aside and told me, "You conduct the press conference today."
I learned a very important lesson that day. When failure occurred, the leader of the organization owned that failure. When success came, he gave it to his team. The best management lesson I have learned did not come to me from reading a book; it came from that experience.
Things That Money Can't Buy
1. Family and friends
The greenbacks won't bring you any closer to your family if you are far too busy earning them. Nor will they guarantee your family understands you at all. (Mummy's cooking is a sub-group in this 'things you can't buy anywhere' list.)
There are exceptions to this. You might just pay off irritating in-laws to stay out of your hair, or order a hit on them. But in the normal course...
With friends, it works the same way, only more so. If your wealth draws them, they aren't real. If they don't stay, or your life has no place for them, you are on your own. With real friends, you've almost got it made.
2. Home
Get married, start a family, have kids. Will they grow up into fine people? Have you got the hang of father/motherhood? Is your home really your castle, a cocoon of comfort? Or is it just a house with people in it? The card really stops here.
3. Happiness
Alright, cliched, but it gets truer as the years pass. There is always something missing whether you are on the beach at Algarve or adding the newest antique wood furniture to your collection. If you can't get at the root of it, everything you can get is merely a narcotic.
4. Peace
Here is the big one, ever since they started asking smart questions to beauty contestants. The small peace is inside your head and that is elusive enough to come by, for which you have antacids and Ketorol, which only push it away for another day. Also think world peace and other big matters. What if they nuke the city? Kidding.
5. Immortality
If you can make it for three decades on top of the Forbes list, that is a measure of fame. But to be truly immortal requires other things, other ways of striving. Ever wondered how some dirt-poor hardscrabble guys have instant recall value centuries afterwards? And literal immortality is yet several pages farther in human civilisation's sci-fi book. Best you can do is get a ticket on Sir Richard Branson's space taxi.
6. Respect
You can smirk at the poor ants down below on the street, but they will pull faces behind your back if you are the sort who is perpetually asking for it. Dignity is the most fragile of public possessions. And God help you if they know about the skeletons in your closet or that you were called Stinky as a kid. This is one asset you really need to work on all the time to earn...
7. Talent
Another cliched, misused, misunderstood word, like creativity, and maybe no one knows what it is anymore, but you are either born with it or not. No way you can get a bill of sale on this one. What you do with it is of course your business. History has been very frequently marked with astonishing examples of creativity outdoing... well, money and everything else. Possibly the best example is Lenoardo da Vinci and a certain portrait of a woman. He took 16 years to paint it, did not bother to name it, packed it with himself wherever he travelled in Europe, refused to sell it to kings and counts. It was ultimately sold by his assistant after he died. Someone down the line decided to call it the Mona Lisa [Images].
At the other end of the example is Vincent Van Gogh. All that talent and he sold just one painting of the nearly thousand he made, struggling with poverty all along. Didn't make a difference either way: in 1990, his Portrait of Dr Gachet went under the hammer for a current equivalent of $ 136.1 million, making it the fourth most expensive painting ever sold.
8. Health
Sure healthcare costs being the way they are, you need all the money you can lay your hands on when it comes to facing the bills and pills and the doctor scaring you with a dozen different possible diseases you have never heard about. But, viewed sanely, a good efficient treatment is not that much of a substitute for a good healthy life. Isn't it better not to need healthcare in the first place?
9. Love
It matters, that little empty feeling when you are sitting with a Sauvignon Blanc (for choice) on your balcony on a Saturday evening and twenty sober thoughts in your head, and no one to tell them to. That feeling of intense loneliness can neither be bought off, papered over or told to keep quiet and leave the room. Someone says, "Money can't buy love, but with all the other things it can, I'll give love a miss." Your call. You still have the Sauvignon Blanc...
10. Character
In case it matters. It is a sneaky creature, goes by other strange names like virtue and righteousness and at one time, if we remember reading correctly, a certain generation used to call it "true wealth". We don't really know whether it is around in these times but if you are looking to have it, it has to come from within. Or some such thing...
11. Vision and mission of your life
The old age by W W Ziege goes like this: 'Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude and nothing on earth can help the man with wrong mental attitude'.
Without vision and mission you are like a jet without a flight plan or maybe a brain surgeon operating with a blindfold on. Lasting self mastery and excellence will only come about when you set precise goals and have a clear vision and mission plan in place.
Clear goals are foundation of success and if you do not set clear cut goals then it would be like a ship moving through deep seas without a course. And alas these are not a commodity which can be bought!
12. Networking and building nurtured relationships
You are the centre of your own universe. Where your universe intersects or overlaps someone else's, your lines cross that person's universe. If you could draw a map of the entire universe, you'd have a mesh or a web. Staying in touch and focusing on action is not only important for our evolution but is also a vital need to meet the larger challenges facing us today.
When we join hands with other people and share our dreams, aspirations, concerns and dreams not only do we find inner strength in this kinship but also practical help and ideas to carry out joint initiatives effectively. Remember, together each achieves more.
This is something that has to be cultivated and is not something that can be bought overhand.
13. Values
The highest good in human beings is their own self. This is the love, awareness and bliss of our inner most divine being. Everything worthwhile in life is an expression of this divinity. All that we value is the hidden quest for this divine source: Jack Welch in his book Winning.
Everything we do is based consciously or unconsciously on our values, attitudes and or conceptions of what is good and desirable. They are our inherent notions of what ought to be. Thus values are set of behaviours: specific, nitty-gritty and so descriptive they leave little to imagination.
People must be able to use them as marching orders because they are the how of the mission, the means to the end: Winning. And if u guessed it right folks values is not something which you can buy but what is nurtured by your traditional roots.
14. Personal development
There goes an old age saying: 'A little bit of something is better than plenty of nothing'.
The challenge is to use your energy to cut through and go beyond all your fears, your weaknesses, your insecurities and doubts and bring about a change in your lives. Making things happen and anything thought of and considered useful must finally be converted into inspired action.
Aptly put by a Chinese thinker: 'Even a journey of a thousand miles begins with one logical step' and that is development of self.
Everyone aims at self development and this is something which, again, cannot be bought. One has to build personal development as a way of life by organising the day effectively, identify transferable skills and personal competence and improve the overall quality of working.
15. Genius
It's like tooth extraction of a cavity-filled tooth. As a dentist removes the cavity-filled tooth you must get rid of your weaknesses and focus on your strengths and bring out the genius in you by realising what is your liking and your passion.
Genius in you is built by keeping a focus and bringing about daily improvements thus striving to build a genius through sustained efforts.
16. Mentor and guide
Mentoring is a relationship between openness, freedom and confidence. It is a protected relationship in which learning and experimentation can occur, potential skills can be developed, and in which results can be measured in terms of competencies gained.
Mentoring comes in by developing a special relationship which is based on mutual trust and dependence for learning and growing to upgrade your knowledge and skills.
17. Team spirit
'See the world for yourself. Have faith in the way things are. Love the world as yourself, then you can care for all things': Tao Te Ching.
Existence is one whole symphony of working together joyfully similar to thousands of species of plant and animals found in a rain forest. Team spirit brings about a sense of belonging and helps us realise the truth that each achieves more.
This spirit has to be developed with mutual benefits to all and incorporates a deeper understanding, a sense of commitment and compatibility by dissolving ego and individual differences. Rabindranath Tagore rightly said: 'There is no such thing as absolute isolation in existence and the only way of attaining truth is through interpenetrating our being into all our objects.'
All this cannot be bought but developed and nurtured through constant interactions. Guides / gurus cannot be bought by money. You need to find a friend, a philosopher and guide with whom you can develop an understanding for future guidance for help in your career, your profession. You cannot force anybody to become your mentor but develop a mutual trust and understanding over time.
18. Humility
The state of being humble .Getting rid of the feeling of pride, ego and being self obsessed. Let others also express themselves. Do not try to superimpose our views on others every time. One has to cultivate humility and, I bet, money cannot buy humility.
19. Developing efficiency
Follow the POLCA mantra: Planning, organising, leading, controlling and taking action. All this cannot be bought with money but it's a discipline in one's life which has to be incorporated in to become efficient and successful.
20. Adaptability and acceptability
Changed conditions induce an almost indefinite amount of fluctuating variability, by which the whole organisation is rendered in some degree of plastic: Charles Darwin. Hence it's your capacity to react and adjust to new and changing situations that will help you achieve your aims. The innate nature of human adaptability can be seen in the way infants adjust physically, socially and emotionally to their new world from the time they are born.
Constant reinforcements of our adaptability to differing situations make it a habit and frame an acceptable behaviour towards the society. This is something that comes naturally and money cannot buy.
The greenbacks won't bring you any closer to your family if you are far too busy earning them. Nor will they guarantee your family understands you at all. (Mummy's cooking is a sub-group in this 'things you can't buy anywhere' list.)
There are exceptions to this. You might just pay off irritating in-laws to stay out of your hair, or order a hit on them. But in the normal course...
With friends, it works the same way, only more so. If your wealth draws them, they aren't real. If they don't stay, or your life has no place for them, you are on your own. With real friends, you've almost got it made.
2. Home
Get married, start a family, have kids. Will they grow up into fine people? Have you got the hang of father/motherhood? Is your home really your castle, a cocoon of comfort? Or is it just a house with people in it? The card really stops here.
3. Happiness
Alright, cliched, but it gets truer as the years pass. There is always something missing whether you are on the beach at Algarve or adding the newest antique wood furniture to your collection. If you can't get at the root of it, everything you can get is merely a narcotic.
4. Peace
Here is the big one, ever since they started asking smart questions to beauty contestants. The small peace is inside your head and that is elusive enough to come by, for which you have antacids and Ketorol, which only push it away for another day. Also think world peace and other big matters. What if they nuke the city? Kidding.
5. Immortality
If you can make it for three decades on top of the Forbes list, that is a measure of fame. But to be truly immortal requires other things, other ways of striving. Ever wondered how some dirt-poor hardscrabble guys have instant recall value centuries afterwards? And literal immortality is yet several pages farther in human civilisation's sci-fi book. Best you can do is get a ticket on Sir Richard Branson's space taxi.
6. Respect
You can smirk at the poor ants down below on the street, but they will pull faces behind your back if you are the sort who is perpetually asking for it. Dignity is the most fragile of public possessions. And God help you if they know about the skeletons in your closet or that you were called Stinky as a kid. This is one asset you really need to work on all the time to earn...
7. Talent
Another cliched, misused, misunderstood word, like creativity, and maybe no one knows what it is anymore, but you are either born with it or not. No way you can get a bill of sale on this one. What you do with it is of course your business. History has been very frequently marked with astonishing examples of creativity outdoing... well, money and everything else. Possibly the best example is Lenoardo da Vinci and a certain portrait of a woman. He took 16 years to paint it, did not bother to name it, packed it with himself wherever he travelled in Europe, refused to sell it to kings and counts. It was ultimately sold by his assistant after he died. Someone down the line decided to call it the Mona Lisa [Images].
At the other end of the example is Vincent Van Gogh. All that talent and he sold just one painting of the nearly thousand he made, struggling with poverty all along. Didn't make a difference either way: in 1990, his Portrait of Dr Gachet went under the hammer for a current equivalent of $ 136.1 million, making it the fourth most expensive painting ever sold.
8. Health
Sure healthcare costs being the way they are, you need all the money you can lay your hands on when it comes to facing the bills and pills and the doctor scaring you with a dozen different possible diseases you have never heard about. But, viewed sanely, a good efficient treatment is not that much of a substitute for a good healthy life. Isn't it better not to need healthcare in the first place?
9. Love
It matters, that little empty feeling when you are sitting with a Sauvignon Blanc (for choice) on your balcony on a Saturday evening and twenty sober thoughts in your head, and no one to tell them to. That feeling of intense loneliness can neither be bought off, papered over or told to keep quiet and leave the room. Someone says, "Money can't buy love, but with all the other things it can, I'll give love a miss." Your call. You still have the Sauvignon Blanc...
10. Character
In case it matters. It is a sneaky creature, goes by other strange names like virtue and righteousness and at one time, if we remember reading correctly, a certain generation used to call it "true wealth". We don't really know whether it is around in these times but if you are looking to have it, it has to come from within. Or some such thing...
11. Vision and mission of your life
The old age by W W Ziege goes like this: 'Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude and nothing on earth can help the man with wrong mental attitude'.
Without vision and mission you are like a jet without a flight plan or maybe a brain surgeon operating with a blindfold on. Lasting self mastery and excellence will only come about when you set precise goals and have a clear vision and mission plan in place.
Clear goals are foundation of success and if you do not set clear cut goals then it would be like a ship moving through deep seas without a course. And alas these are not a commodity which can be bought!
12. Networking and building nurtured relationships
You are the centre of your own universe. Where your universe intersects or overlaps someone else's, your lines cross that person's universe. If you could draw a map of the entire universe, you'd have a mesh or a web. Staying in touch and focusing on action is not only important for our evolution but is also a vital need to meet the larger challenges facing us today.
When we join hands with other people and share our dreams, aspirations, concerns and dreams not only do we find inner strength in this kinship but also practical help and ideas to carry out joint initiatives effectively. Remember, together each achieves more.
This is something that has to be cultivated and is not something that can be bought overhand.
13. Values
The highest good in human beings is their own self. This is the love, awareness and bliss of our inner most divine being. Everything worthwhile in life is an expression of this divinity. All that we value is the hidden quest for this divine source: Jack Welch in his book Winning.
Everything we do is based consciously or unconsciously on our values, attitudes and or conceptions of what is good and desirable. They are our inherent notions of what ought to be. Thus values are set of behaviours: specific, nitty-gritty and so descriptive they leave little to imagination.
People must be able to use them as marching orders because they are the how of the mission, the means to the end: Winning. And if u guessed it right folks values is not something which you can buy but what is nurtured by your traditional roots.
14. Personal development
There goes an old age saying: 'A little bit of something is better than plenty of nothing'.
The challenge is to use your energy to cut through and go beyond all your fears, your weaknesses, your insecurities and doubts and bring about a change in your lives. Making things happen and anything thought of and considered useful must finally be converted into inspired action.
Aptly put by a Chinese thinker: 'Even a journey of a thousand miles begins with one logical step' and that is development of self.
Everyone aims at self development and this is something which, again, cannot be bought. One has to build personal development as a way of life by organising the day effectively, identify transferable skills and personal competence and improve the overall quality of working.
15. Genius
It's like tooth extraction of a cavity-filled tooth. As a dentist removes the cavity-filled tooth you must get rid of your weaknesses and focus on your strengths and bring out the genius in you by realising what is your liking and your passion.
Genius in you is built by keeping a focus and bringing about daily improvements thus striving to build a genius through sustained efforts.
16. Mentor and guide
Mentoring is a relationship between openness, freedom and confidence. It is a protected relationship in which learning and experimentation can occur, potential skills can be developed, and in which results can be measured in terms of competencies gained.
Mentoring comes in by developing a special relationship which is based on mutual trust and dependence for learning and growing to upgrade your knowledge and skills.
17. Team spirit
'See the world for yourself. Have faith in the way things are. Love the world as yourself, then you can care for all things': Tao Te Ching.
Existence is one whole symphony of working together joyfully similar to thousands of species of plant and animals found in a rain forest. Team spirit brings about a sense of belonging and helps us realise the truth that each achieves more.
This spirit has to be developed with mutual benefits to all and incorporates a deeper understanding, a sense of commitment and compatibility by dissolving ego and individual differences. Rabindranath Tagore rightly said: 'There is no such thing as absolute isolation in existence and the only way of attaining truth is through interpenetrating our being into all our objects.'
All this cannot be bought but developed and nurtured through constant interactions. Guides / gurus cannot be bought by money. You need to find a friend, a philosopher and guide with whom you can develop an understanding for future guidance for help in your career, your profession. You cannot force anybody to become your mentor but develop a mutual trust and understanding over time.
18. Humility
The state of being humble .Getting rid of the feeling of pride, ego and being self obsessed. Let others also express themselves. Do not try to superimpose our views on others every time. One has to cultivate humility and, I bet, money cannot buy humility.
19. Developing efficiency
Follow the POLCA mantra: Planning, organising, leading, controlling and taking action. All this cannot be bought with money but it's a discipline in one's life which has to be incorporated in to become efficient and successful.
20. Adaptability and acceptability
Changed conditions induce an almost indefinite amount of fluctuating variability, by which the whole organisation is rendered in some degree of plastic: Charles Darwin. Hence it's your capacity to react and adjust to new and changing situations that will help you achieve your aims. The innate nature of human adaptability can be seen in the way infants adjust physically, socially and emotionally to their new world from the time they are born.
Constant reinforcements of our adaptability to differing situations make it a habit and frame an acceptable behaviour towards the society. This is something that comes naturally and money cannot buy.
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