F# Major

My sister-in-law, Munizeh, first brought this my notice: Japanese fans clean up the stadium after their team ended 0-0 with Greece on 19 June 2014. It brought to mind an article I had read in Slate soon after the devastation of March 2011 called Stop, Thief! Thank You . Why so little looting in Japan? It's not just about honesty. Well, Honesty, with incentives works for them and perhaps that's what really matters. On the topic of the World Cup 2014, More Americans Watch the World Cup Than the World Series and The Day America Fell in Love with the World Cup and the Economist explains how sportsmen cope with Ramadan

The International Crisis Group is out with its latest report on education reforms in Pakistan : "“Pakistan needs to take bold steps to tackle its education crisis”, says Jonathan Prentice, Acting Asia Program Director. “Millions of children are still out of school, and the quality of education for those enrolled remains poor. This is more than a question of the rights of children, vital though that is; ultimately, it goes directly to the state’s ability to combat extremism. Decades of neglect can only be reversed by overhauling Pakistan’s academic curriculum and education bureaucracy”. I hope people, especially those in charge of planning and development, read this and maybe, perhaps maybe, start taking the steps for much needed reform.

You can learn much more from observing people than listening to them. Joe Navarro has a good book, What Every Body is Saying. He knows his stuff; he's an ex-FBI agent. http://m.entrepreneur.com/article/234809 And here are 25 body language signs you should know about.

Dealing with media can be difficult, challenging, and career defining. I found Jerry Weissman's book, In the Line of Fire, a short, practical resource that anybody can put to use. The Colin Powell examples were helpful. Jay Carney, who recently stepped down as press secretary, shares his experience: http://m.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/monitor_breakfast/2014/0619/Jay-Carney-departing-Obama-press-secretary-pulls-back-White-House-curtain?

Roger Martin, author of Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works , gives his take on why smart people struggle with strategy: " The problem with smart people is that they are used to seeking and finding the right answer." Problem is, the world's changing too fast to get a grip on and the ability to accommodate failure and success is important. It's all about the choices one makes and some of those choices are going to be wrong or things will happen that will make them wrong. Good strategists are people who have " flexibility, imagination, and resilience ." Truth is, if we were all so good at strategy, things could be very different today...but perhaps not for the better. What would we teach in management schools if all companies were successful strategists? But then again, one reads so many points of view on strategy that developing a clarity on the term and the process can become a tad difficult. Is strategy more innovation today, for example? Here is

Bad leadership is everywhere with remarkable repercussions on the health of organisations and their ability to add value. A post on Linkedin by Jay Torres summarises it quite clearly: Employees don’t really want to quit your company - They want to quit a REALLY bad Manager Jay has a short list of questions you should ask about one's managers: Do they: 1.  give you clarity on company strategy and goals? 2. listen? 3. feel they're always right? 4. invest in the team? 5. make people go out of their way to avoid them? "Too many managers call themselves leaders when they are anything but, showing little ability, empathy or humility to engender trust and confidence their staff and others around them. They actually end up driving good people out the door and introduce a spiral of failure and financial loss for their company." Are business schools failing their stakeholders by not teaching people the right skill set for leading people and organisations? Can this stuff be rea

Thank you, Casey. If I listen to 80s music much more than music from any other decade, you're part of the reason why . Rome 1985-86. A friend of mine introduced me to the American Top 40, recorded off the radio on cassette. And Casey introduced me to music I still listen to - Bon Jovi , Bruce Hornsby , Huey Lewis and the News , Starship , and so many others! That was also the era of Miami Vice and "the cop with no socks" Don Johnson was everywhere with the show and his debut album, Heartbeat . More than the songs, it was Casey's snippets of information about the artists and songs that made the Top 40 so listenable and likable. RIP, Casey. I'm hard pressed to think of any other radio personality with your impact.

World Cup is here and if you're not as au courant as you would like to be, read this... http://longform.org/posts/the-longform-guide-to-the-world-cup?

Are most of us resigned to the fact that government will not change? Poor or no service will remain endemic and paying a little extra to get things done is a cost of service that we have accepted and accounted for? John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge of the Economist authored The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State recently. According to them, " The age of big government is over; the age of smart government has begun." And more emphatically, "The race to get government right is not just a race of efficiency. It is a race to see which political values will triumph in the twenty-first century—the liberal values of democracy and liberty or the authoritarian values of command and control. The stakes could not be higher." [I loved their 1996 book, The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus , which I hope to them merits a second edition.] Countries need to reinvent the state and technology has a role to play. For more on this

Workplace harassment can take many forms according to Sandra Robinson, University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business . Bullying, harassment, unfairly targetting people and placing them on a "hit list" are common elements that have lead to employee disengagement. But in specific reference to ostracism, "“We found that ostracism was seen as more socially acceptable, less likely to get the actor in trouble at work, and also it was less harmful than bullying behavior," Ms. Robinson told The Huffington Post. The findings of the study revealed that having no role to play in work culture "was more detrimental to one’s well-being than having a negative role to play." Robinson's recommendation: "Managers can go a long way to educate their employees that this treatment is just as unacceptable as sexual and verbal harassment and should be absorbed into workplace bullying policies." Managers need to have clearly-defined sense of r

Well, most HP products have "invent" written on them somewhere so th is makes sense. It would be interesting to see the result of this, given that most people access the Internet on mobile devices. Rising data volumes from "cloud computing, the Internet of things, mobile networks, machine to machine computing" are generating unfathomable and unmanageable amounts of data and a new computing architecture is necessary to deal with it, (CEO Meg) Whitman said. I'm reminded of Queen's Radio Gaga: "You've had the time, you've had the power, you've yet to have your finest hour..."

I began listening to James way back in 1993 when Laid was released and Say Something was the song. James disbanded in 2001, regrouped a few years later and released their new album in May 2014. La Petite Mort was recorded in the wake of Tim Booth losing his mother and best friend in quick succession and many of the songs deal with mortality. The video for the song, Moving On, moved me to tears. It's a been quite a while sing a song and its video have come together and conveyed emotions so eloquently. I couldn't help myself. See the video and read more: http://vimeo.com/blog/post:631 Welcome back, James. I dusted off all the eleven CDs that I own this morning and the little sticker on Laid had a review saying it was the kind of music one would be listening to even after 20 years. Truer words could not have been written. Still a fantastic album and superb production by Brian Eno . That man has the touch of gold!

In the last couple of weeks, the early morning fresh air has been ruined by the smell of burning leaves, this morning was no exception. Suffice it to say, it's not an odour I'm particularly fond of. And as I look out my office window to a small park across the street, I see clouds of silver smoke polluting the air. It's maddening, more so since I read the introduction to the OECD's recent report on air pollution: "Our report provides us all with a “wake-up call”. We have important evidence of the scale of the problem. We now need to work together to tackle it. We literally need to design better policies for better, and longer, healthier lives." Roadworks and burning leaves...Islamabad's changing.

Roselinde Torres: What it takes to be a great leader #TED : http://on.ted.com/c0ELb

I'll admit that I was interested in the budget of the year 2013-2014 albeit from the personal perspective of how amount of tax deducted from my salary would change. This year, when the budget was presented on 3 June 2014, my interest was non-existent. One of our newspapers, Dawn, called it a disappointing budget and gave their (hard to argue with) reasons why: "Assessing the quality of a budget is necessarily linked to how effectively it addresses the particular challenges the economy is facing in any given period, but there are at least three basic elements that need to be looked at always: the revenue and expenditure sides; a growth strategy; and a vision for equitable growth that touches all sections of society. On all three counts, the government has offered little of substance." "‘No relief for the poor’ was the instant reaction of most of the Pakistanis after hearing the budget speech on the evening of June 3, 2014" says the article, The Mathem

What's your purpose? What can you do bring about change? How can you encourage people to do good? Some useful suggestions here:   One Simple Way to Reduce Employee Turnover Want your employees to stick around? Try creating a culture of good. It might not be the first thing that comes to mind, but helping employees volunteer can benefit your company on several levels. Research has shown that two hours of helping others a week results in higher satisfaction with life , and everybody knows happier employees are more productive

Born in 2010: How much is left for me? http://www.coolinfographics.com/blog/2014/5/29/born-in-2010-how-much-is-left-for-me.html