Vol 5, Issue No. 7
July 2006

Articles

Idea of the month
Case of the month
HR
Organizational Behaviour
Managerial Skills

Resources

Book of the Month
Motivational Quotes
Intek's Q&A Forum
Free Resource


Training Calendar 2006

Training Workshops in UAE, Saudi Arabia and Singapore


Book of the Month

Shift - Inside Nissan's Historic Revival
by Carlos Ghosn




Monthly Quote
"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."
Charles Darwin, biologist



Motivational Quotes



Corporate Humor



 

Stress Management

1. Try the following yoga technique whenever you feel the need to relax. Inhale deeply through your nose to the count of eight. Then with lips puckered, exhale very slowly through your mouth to the count of 15 or for as long as you can. Concentrate on the long sighing sound and feel the tension dissolve. Repeat 10 times.

2. Take a hot bath or shower (or a cool one in the summertime) to relieve tension.

3. Add an ounce of love to everything you do.

Intek understands the importance and growing demand of IT Professionals in the world. Therefore, looking at the interest and bright future of the society, and the high costs demanded by various IT institutes,  Intek proudly offers 'Free IT Training' for 'Deserving Individuals'.




Get your questions solved from Intek's Q & A Forum



July Birthdays

Wishing all our Participants a very
Happy Birthday
"Do we know your Birthday?"

Dear Friends

Why do we have fear against failure. Why does my heart start thumping at the prospect of making mistakes? People learn by Failing. We don’t realize that if it weren’t for failures we would learn nothing and our personality would remain undeveloped and un-evolved.

Our educational system is not helping matters either, with its rigid abhorrence of any kind of failure. Keeping up with the system, parents fall into the same trap and cajole, threaten kids not to fall short of the current standards. The question to ask is does education help prepare students to successfully cope, risk, and innovate in a rapidly changing world? A fearless approach to learning, one where mistakes are valued for the lessons they provide, is recommended. Far too often, students allow themselves to be immobilized by fear of making mistakes. Teachers contribute to this situation by stressing correct answers over an examination of processes used to arrive at a solution.

We associate failing with education, and tend to remember the agony of bad grades in school or being embarrassed in front of our schoolmates rather than the thrill of learning. Failure can certainly be agonizing. It might even be catastrophic. Most failures, however, aren't catastrophic; they are merely "expectation failures." That is, when you expect one thing and something different occurs. It is easy to see how such expectation failures lead to learning.

This is the understanding cycle at work. We label our experiences with respect to their outcomes. When the outcome matches our expectations, we don't learn a great deal; we just continue the same behaviors or actions. When the outcome fails to match our expectations, we need to recover from the failure so as not to repeat the same behavior next time. Thus, we can learn a lot by failing.

Even what we typically call "success" often involves expectation failure. For instance, you may not particularly like squid. However, it may be that you go to a restaurant where you are served squid you really enjoy. While you would label this meal a success, your expectation about squid actually failed and you learned something as a result.

When Liz Beattie, a retired teacher, recently tried to persuade The Professional Association of Teachers to delete the word failure from the educational vocabulary and replace it with the term deferred success, it attracted widespread ridicule. She maintained that repeated failure at exams could damage a pupil’s interest in learning. As it turned out, Liz Beattie’s success was deferred; her proposal was rejected.

I happen to attend the sports day of my kids last month and it was interesting to observe the reactions of parents. Some were beating their heads when their kids were not showing dexterity at the hurdle races, shouting at them , while some parents were hugging their tail enders and encouraging them to do better next time, while some scolding them, while some were justifying the bad performance of their kids to the other parents, by saying that their kid had just come out of a viral infection. It was so obvious, how the parents themselves felt about failure. How do you react in such circumstances?

Failure does not define the person; it is how the person deals with, and learns from, failure that defines the person. Life rewards perseverance.

I am a great fan of Thomas Edison and his positive approach towards failure. “I have not failed, I've just found 10,000 ways that don't work.”

But there are different kinds of failure. Sometimes, failure tells you to give up and do something else entirely. Other times, it tells you to try a different approach, a new route to the top of the mountain. Or it may tell you to make a detour. Sometimes, it tells you that you need help. Sometimes, it doesn't seem to tell you anything. Linda Stone, a former executive at both Apple Computer and Microsoft, recalls a conversation she participated in with Steve Wozniak and Dean Kamen, perhaps the two best-known living inventors.

"I'll never forget it," Stone says. "They just were talking about all their failures, and how they both felt like failures." They were almost bragging about various laboratory fiascoes and catastrophes. Given their success, this seemed extraordinary. According to Stone, the conversation occurred just before an awards ceremony. "They were both being celebrated," she says. So Wozniak and Kamen clearly weren't talking about their failures as a way of feeling sorry for themselves. Rather, they were identifying with a thinking strategy they both had in common. "Every failure is a learning experience," concludes Stone, "and it should be seen as part of progress, rather than seeing it as the enemy."

Failures are intrinsically far more interesting and memorable than successes. Whenever I ask people to give me examples of learning from experience, they invariably cite a mishap, mistake or failure. No wonder experiential learning is often referred to as the school of hard knocks! In my experience, it is much easier to learn from failure than success. When an outcome matches or exceeds our expectations, we let out a whoop of joy and continue on with much the same behaviours and actions as before. By contrast, when an outcome fails to live up to expectations, we are more likely to try something different to avoid repeating the failure. The realisation that we need to change our approach key, and is the point at which learning comes to the rescue.

It isn’t failure itself that is interesting, so much as our reactions to it. I have always been fascinated by the way some people have their spirits broken by setbacks and failures while other people rise to the occasion and persevere against what, at the time, must seem like hopeless odds.

Wishing all our friends the fortitude to learn from their failures.

As always look forward to your suggestions / feedback which helps the Intek team to continually improve this Ezine.

Zaufyshan Haseeb
 

In The Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky writes:
"An idea with a single sense can lead you along only one track.
Then, if anything goes wrong, it just gets stuck- a thought that sits in your mind with nowhere to go."

Connect any idea you have to other things you know, see to what this inspires you. Not only will this give you different ways to go (so if the first solution doesn't work, you can solve the problem another way), but it may lead to other ideas, even richer than the first you can up with.

 

Why should even blue collar workers act in a self-responsible manner and participate in the decision process on their work and their working environment? The answer is simple: because only then they identify themselves with the decision to be taken. Good assembly- line workers know the shortest work procedures and the little "snags" of their machines much better than their supervisors who – in a hierarchically-oriented company - often have the responsibility over the whole machine park. Each individual employee of a company is able to think like a businessperson. All it takes is asking them to do so. In Belgium, the Volvo Car plant is often cited as an example of this new kind of thinking. It is a triumph of an employee-friendly approach. Yet, they didn't do it without economic purpose. Volvo Cars learned that ...

click here to read more

Applying Positive Psychology to goal management increases effectiveness.

Business leaders manage goals by setting and systematically striving to achieve them. While management and organizational researchers have laid the groundwork for goal management, the emerging field of Positive Psychology appears to offer many additional findings and insights that will help managerial leaders be more effective as they define and pursue goals. Factors such as character strengths, optimism, and resilience can play significant roles in how well goals are managed. In the end, a managerial leader’s ability to make wise choices and to implement pathways that lead to attaining desired goals is critical to success. Drawing from the field of Positive Psychology, this article provides guidance to help you more effectively manage goals by focusing on such factors as personal values, persistence, and confidence.

Personal Values Commitment
Our values are at the heart of what is important in life and work. Effective managerial leaders serve themselves and others best when they are committed to a set of core values. This commitment takes three forms:....

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Let’s face the reality, sometimes it’s hard to tell the truth - especially when it’s negative - which is why so many managers put off addressing performance management problems and why so many bad employees don’t get fired.

Every manager has, at some point in his or her career, dealt with unacceptable employee behavior. It could be someone who whines, assigns blame, worries incessantly, or watches the clock. It’s one of the most dreaded, complicated, and avoided situations supervisors encounter. There are numerous psychological reasons why managers fail to address poor performers, the co-workers’ resentment and the team dysfunction. Here are six of the most common:

Problem 1: The manager feels dependent upon the employee.

Sometimes, a poorly performing employee has some special talent or connection that makes them seem indispensable. In today's tight lab our market, many managers continue to put time, money and energy into marginal staff members because they fear they won't be able to find more competent ones.

Solution: ....

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Happy Canada Day
(July 1st)

Happy Independence Day (USA - July 14th)





Life Skills
by Haseeb Hasan

Training Planner 2006



Intek's Upcoming workshops

Effective Managerial skills Workshop

To equip participants with effective managing tools with regard to Goal Setting, Delegation Skills, Team Building, Leadership, Time Management, Communication, Stress Management and Motivation
For more details...

Finance for Non-Finance Workshop

To equip participants with adequate financial tools to analyze financial statements and financial performance. Prime areas of focus include Balance Sheet, Profit & Loss, Cash Budget, Capital Budgets, Financial Ratios, etc.
For more details...


 

The Super Secretary
Workshop

Intended for secretaries, P.A’s and office assistants who, apart from taking a refreshing break would acquire time saving techniques and be extremely motivated to return to their work places. It would act as a refresher to all the organizing skills, which were left behind during the daily fire fighting activities.
For more details...
 

A glimpse of Intek's
Previous Workshops

Team Building
Workshop

Customised for
Qatar Petroleum
May 2006 - Sheraton Hotel
Doha - Qatar

Group Strategy Workshop

Customised for M'sharie
May 2006 - Movenpick Hotel
Dubai - UAE