“We are all people and we react the same way.” I hear this so often from Anglo-Saxon people. Those who say it frequently have no idea how wrong they are. Imagine: you are in second-grade at school in Hiroshima, three floors up. It is August 1945. There is a big flash just over half… [Read more…]
April 8, 2011
I don’t intend to stray into politics with this blog but I might be right on the edge today. There was an incident earlier this week in New York where a school Principal was put under disciplinary review for herself disciplining two pupils who had disobeyed an instruction to sit down in school assembly… [Read more…]
April 7, 2011
Ladies and gentlemen of the internet, I present to you an unusual thinker on management, the Reverend W Awdry, creator of Thomas the Tank Engine and his friends. Since the books were resurrected almost thirty years ago, millions of parents worldwide (including me) have read these stories to their children, enjoying them for what they… [Read more…]
April 6, 2011
Run through any list of companies and professional service firms and you will find a huge variety of different values listed. Here’s a few I derived from a very quick search: excellence, people, teamwork, heart, reliability, accountability, customer service, openness, trust, dedication, pride, respect, commitment and so on. They’re all valued characteristics. Clearly, you can’t… [Read more…]
April 4, 2011
This is the first guest post on the blog. It’s from Majdi Alhmah who is the General Manager of a Bahraini/Chinese joint venture in Changchun, Jilin province in North-Eastern China. He has lived in Changchun for 5 years. Majdi’s company, BFG International China Co. Ltd., makes components for the high-speed trains now operating across China.… [Read more…]
April 1, 2011
Continuing my mini-series about the importance of values, in conversation with another blogger the other night, I was reminded by something Jack Welch once wrote. (Yes, I know he had his flaws as a leader, but that doesn’t mean everything he said was nonsense. Far from it.) Welch used to write a chapter on management… [Read more…]
April 11, 2011
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