Quite a few people experience being stuck in their jobs, especially their sectors. Dissatisfied at work, they bide their time for years. They shun jobs within the sector, as they want to make the switch. As time goes by, they are frustrated waiting for that one elusive call from a recruiter looking to place them in a different sector. And when that call comes, it admittedly looks a little too average, too common-place. It is an unexceptional job on all counts. The only thing it has going for it is your sector-switch. Let us say, you are marooned on an island for years. You are self-sufficient on the island replete with all the resources a human needs to survive. But you pine for human company, to rejoin civilization. You never sight any ship after countless hours of keeping watch. You languish on this island for years. Survival on the island is not at all a challenge, getting out is. One day, a small, worn-out but sea-worthy boat miraculously kisses the shore of your island. An uncouth fisherman is barely civil…
Why communication skills training is so much more than just working with individuals?
What is effortless for us to initiate takes concerted effort to do well. Take breathing & sitting. We breathe on autopilot. Hardly think about it. It barely registers how we sit. We slump into perceived comfort which is anything but that. We all know that there is a mindful breathing practise that makes us breathe better among other things. We all know our spinal health depends on a healthy sitting posture. We never get down to doing both unless we suffer some pain. Is communicating any different? We all can talk & hear wilfully; to fill the silence. And lo & behold, we are all communicators; so we think! The results do not deliver what we communicated for. This is especially true in organizations. Information is the currency of organizational transactions. Is there any other? When people envision & share, plan & co-ordinate, market & sell, organize & implement; they are always communicating information in some form or the other. Due to its all-pervasive nature, organizations rarely disown communication skills as a learning need. They attribute most problems to lack…
What Google’s doodles teach us?
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. In the main, Google commemorates landmark events, festivals, achievements,icons in the form of doodles on its home page. Thoughfully suited to region and country sometimes. What is significant is that Google makes it a point to feature doodles on achievements and achievers that are relatively obscure or distant for a world used to consume todays information yesterday. Scientists, astronomers, artists are prominent in the selection. And more often than not, the ones featured are those whose pioneering contributions of great historical, scientific, and cultural importance have led to the breakthroughs we may know of. These people are the giants on whose shoulders the famous and well-known achievers have stood. In doing this, Google does not just organize the world’s information, but digs up gems long buried under the sands of time. This is thinking beyond eyeballs and click-throughs. This is putting your hand-up, and taking a stand saying , ” We believe this is significant, worth-knowing, and appreciating. This has enriched our world in ways…
A superb critique of the case-study method by Russell Ackoff
In an interview, Russell Ackoff was asked about the case-study method of teaching. I present the question & Ackoff’s response Detrick – Business schools like to talk about the usefulness of cases as a teaching pedagogy. What do you think about using cases as a teaching vehicle? Ackoff – “A case is a terrible distortion of reality. It is like learning how to box with one hand tied behind you, then you are suddenly thrown into the ring with somebody who has two hands free. You don’t know what to do. You couldn’t box against a two handed person with one hand, but that’s what cases do to/for you. A problem is an abstraction. It’s extracted out of reality by analysis. Reality consists of complex sets of interacting problems, not isolated problems. So when we deal with a problem we’re already dealing with an abstraction — and now somebody comes along and deprives you of the information needed to formulate the problem. This converts the problem into an exercise. An exercise is a problem for which the person given the problem to…