F# Major

What Does a 40 Year-Old Man Wish He’d Known at 25? http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/things-learned-40-wish-knew-25-hesaid/

Michael Hyatt says "the most consistent practice high achievers share to set themselves up for a great year is to reflect on the current one. It came up again and again in their answers. Doing business with this year is crucial for success in the next." Get Michael's free ebook with lessons learned from some impressive, successful people here . Michael shares how to Get crystal clear about what you want in the next twelve months and how you’re going to get there. Confront doubt and see the real possibility of breakthrough in your personal and professional life. Close the door on the nagging, negative feelings from the past so you can set yourself up for success in the present. Take the mystery out of setting effective, reasonable, and achievable goals. Connect with your why so you can tap reserves of emotional energy and motivation when things get difficult and conquer the “messy middle” once and for all. Finally beat worry, procrastination, and that horrible...

Bob Proctor says the personal development industry is worth US$ 11 bn annually and is growing at a rapid pace. But how often do you see the impact of this industry around you? How many times have you heard people ask " Can I be successful at this? How big of a mark do I want to make?, and What am I willing to do to make it happen?”And how come personal development doesn't link very well with being in a group? In short, despite the growth of the industry, why are our organisations and individuals struggling? I came across three articles this week which got me thinking about this. Deloitte's report, Passion at Work , says "Up to 87.7 percent of America’s workforce is not able to contribute to their full potential because they don’t have passion for their work. Less than 12.3 percent of America’s workforce possesses the attributes of worker passion. This “passion gap” is important because passionate workers are committed to continually achieving higher levels of perform...

On 21 October 2014, the News carried a story by Ansar Abbasi on how Civil services reforms remain a distant dream . A few days before this, the same journalist had a news item on how the interior minister would be spearheading the government's reform efforts because the Prime Minister was too busy to do so himself. Busy with what? Aren't these reforms the hallmark of good governance and thus, should merit total resolve, dedication and zero-tolerance policy for their derailment? I hope there is a kernel of truth in this and that this government is serious about reforms and not saying things for the sake of lip service. In an article, Fault Lines , it was written "Experts rue the regulatory institutions that gave in to the political pressures during the last 15 years, hindering economic stability and growth, badly affecting performance." How about thinking about performance standards for these institutions? How about involving them in the development strategy of t...

I'd rather concentrate on one thing and get into the flow (as Daniel Goleman calls it). But I take solace in my inability to multitask from Daniel Levitin and from the horrifying and sobering statistics on texting and driving.

I came across an essay on the Economist . The nice touch is the book feel that they gave to support the subtitle, From Papyrus to Pixels. While I like my Kindle and the convenience it provides pixel-wise - I can carry hundreds of books relatively easily - I don't see it replacing payrus. There is something ineffable about holding a book, turning the pages, making notes in the margins, and underlining key points. But that's just me. I do find it alarming that reading is becoming a lost skill. What are you reading currently?

In the last month, I came across a few interesting readings on leadership and employees worth sharing. Jacob Morgan has a book out called  The Future of Work: Attract New Talent, Build Better Leaders, and Create a Competitive Organization. He talks about the book in his Forbes post and his manifesto . I especially like the graphic on the evolution of the employee on the Forbes website. Jacob's also involved in a collaborative initiative, The Future Organization. You can join if this is of interest and if you can afford the membership. Good employees stem from and result in good leaders, leaders who inspire, according to Bain and Company, their article, Leaders who inspire: A 21st-century approach to developing your talent . " Leaders can no longer rely only on traditional leadership skills to be effective. They can no longer simply issue directives. Nor can leaders rely heavily on the traditional tools of motivation—the classic carrot-and-stick approach. Instea...

Take a look at Peter Drucker’s Managing Oneself article from Harvard Business Review. Where do you fit in? What are your strengths? How do you perform? Are you a reader or a listener? Do you listen to understand or just to reply? How do you learn? And importantly, what are your values? Perhaps you should start putting your answers down on a piece of paper or an app or whatever you are comfortable with! Now read Greg McKeown's article, " If You Don’t Design Your Career, Someone Else Will ." Take a look at Greg's process...according to him, it changed his life. It just might change yours! The point is, take that first step. Learn to drive!

"...all of us now entrust the most private information about ourselves to the guardianship of public companies that have consistently proven themselves unworthy of that trust." More ... I'm not going to get into the personal nature of stuff that was leaked but how many more lessons do we need to be careful about our personal stuff?

Interesting analysis of changes seen in us over the last couple of centuries. The usual suspects of nutrition, physical activity, increased stress, etc. are all here but I wonder: is technology also contributing something here? Too much information but not enough knowledge? Is googling everything reducing our mental aerobic capacity?

The Global Competitiveness Report is out. From the website, it says "This year’s Report provides an overview of the competitiveness performance of 144 economies, and thus continues to be the most comprehensive assessment of its kind globally." Just how is this comprehensive assessment done? One of our national newspapers dedicated an article on the report's findings on Pakistan, which said "“The security situation remains alarming and Pakistan is the third least safe of all countries covered, behind only Yemen and Libya.” Can things like this be compared? Sure, we have our problems but third least safe? Makes me wonder if I should be scared to step out of my house? I personally prefer the Doing Business report. They explain what they look at, how they look at it, and if they will be changing anything.

When 2014 started, I began a little personal experiment to see how good people would be at remembering my birthday. Not very, I discovered. I'm not on Facebook so that goes against me, I'll admit. But when I make it a point to send somebody an email, sms, whatsapp message, the tone of the majority of responses has been ho-hum and hardly anyone has reciprocated by asking me when my birthday is. Apathy? Lack of manners? Something else? Is sending good wishes to people on their birthday falling out of favour? It makes me question renowned psychologist Matthew Lieberman who, in his book Social , said  that our need to connect with other people is even more fundamental, more basic, than our need for food or shelter. Take a look at Peter Peter Drucker’s Managing Oneself article from Harvard Business Review. In fact, read it often! But here's an interesting snippet from the article: "Manners - simple things like saying 'please' and 'thank you' and knowin...

http://m.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2014/0827/Pakistan-faces-a-major-political-crisis-6-things-to-know

Pink Floyd is about to return with their first album in 20 years. Polly Samson, the wife of singer-guitarist David Gilmour, surprised fans on Saturday when she casually announced over Twitter that the band has a new record in the works and it's coming out this fall. A representative for Gilmour confirmed the release of the album to Rolling Stone .  See Where Pink Floyd Rank on Our List of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time "Btw Pink Floyd album out in October is called 'The Endless River,'" Samson wrote. "Based on 1994 sessions is Rick Wright's swansong and very beautiful." (Keyboardist and founding member Wright died of cancer in 2008 at the age of 65.) The band had just celebrated the 20th anniversary of 1994's The Division Bell with an extravagant reissue of the album on July 1st. The new material appears to be connected to unreleased recordings made during the Division Bell sessions. Durga McBroom-Hudson, a singer who t...

Pakistan’s New Security Operation Is a Humanitarian Crisis. The U.S. Is Partially To Blame. Slate Back in the news recently, the Blackwater scandal shows the U.S. isn’t immune from behaviours we abhor in others. Slate The Secret of Effective Motivation . Strong internal motives matter more, it seems. 7 Myths about Drinking Coffee ( only 7?) and 7 Reasons You Should Start Eating Eggs The Only Ice Cream Recipe You’ll Ever Need [ NYT ] and Chocolate Ganache , an Easygoing French Treat To Job-Hop Or Not? It’s more common now. The  WSJ  studies Amazon's popular highlights feature in an attempt to find  this summer's most unread book . Piketty’s Capital in the 21 st Century seems to be it How to Manage Idea Overflow and How to Pick the Best Idea What Makes People Follow Reluctant Leaders Speaking of reluctant leaders, ever wonder why mediocre bosses get promoted or worse, actually get to run organisations? Check out the Harper’s Index

Another useful one, considering how much google has become the go-to site for looking up anything

I've developed an interest for infographics over the last couple of years, especially those with a management-related theme.

9 DEADLY leadership mistakes according to Peter Economy. I see #2 and #4 far too many times than it can be healthy for an organisation. The rest of the list doesn't seem to merit any importance, at least where I work. Is it any wonder our organisations are failing their stakeholders? You have to check out Marty Neumeier's The 46 Rules of Genius . It's simple and eloquent. "I think you can’t learn the rules until you break them . Somehow you have to test them a little to see which are true and work for you." Ebooks v Paper:  Which do our brains prefer? Research is forcing us to rethink how we respond to the written word. — "There is some evidence that reading on screen can result in less comprehension and even affect sleep patterns. But the research here is complex and inconclusive and, in any case, it is actually doing something far more interesting than telling us which medium is superior. It’s making us think more about what it means to read....

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 ...

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 ...