cannyben

Go to the book section of Amazon.com, enter the keyword “leadership” and see how many hits you get. Most likely you would get around 20,000 hits. Why is there so much material on this one subject ? the law of supply and demand would say it is because people are buying it. But there are other and more subtle reasons.One of those reasons is the underlying belief that leadership can be taught. With enough training, anybody can be a leader. The theory is that leaders are made, not born !The other day someone told that he sees definite leadership traits in his son. I asked him how old he was. “Six”, he replied. Too young to have been through any leadership training. So are leaders born or made ? the answer is both.The problem is that we often get confused with what can and cannot be taught, and at the heart of the confusion is the difference between talent and skill.Talent is what we do well naturally. It is our bent. Talents are inborn, and can be discovered and developed. They cannot be t...

We hear about human rights constantly these days, often in a global context. Yet according to Eleanor Roosevelt, they begin “in small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world.”She went on to say in her address at the 1948 UN Commission on Human Rights that “they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.”The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, now more than 50 years old, was not the first attempt to legislate human rights on an international scale. The post–World War I League of Nations Covenant required members to “endeavour to secure and maintain fair and humane conditions of labour for men, women, and children,” “secu...

Do you long for meaningful work ? Are you bored ? Are you feeling drained ? Are you restless and don’t know why ? Do you feel like you are just putting in your time at work ? The solution is alignment, and there are three steps: 1. Discover what you are designed to do. 2. Do it. 3. Minimize everything else. The idea is to align your work with your natural motivations and talents. Imagine what it would be like to do what you enjoy and are good at, working with interesting subject matter, and relating to others in a comfortable way. Can you picture what life would be like ? do you get a sense of how productive and energized you would be ? Too good to be true ? but it does not happen overnight. Let’s take a look at the steps involved. 1. Discover what you are designed to do. It pinpoints your motivations and their corresponding talents. This is good news, because most people can not make out what it is they are designed to do. 2. Do it. Its all about alignment. Begin to ma...

Go to the book section of Amazon.com, enter the keyword “leadership” and see how many hits you get. Most likely you would get around 20,000 hits. Why is there so much material on this one subject ? the law of supply and demand would say it is because people are buying it. But there are other and more subtle reasons. One of those reasons is the underlying belief that leadership can be taught. With enough training, anybody can be a leader. The theory is that leaders are made, not born ! The other day someone told that he sees definite leadership traits in his son. I asked him how old he was. “Six”, he replied. Too young to have been through any leadership training. So are leaders born or made ? the answer is both. The problem is that we often get confused with what can and cannot be taught, and at the heart of the confusion is the difference between talent and skill. Talent is what we do well naturally. It is our bent. Talents are inborn, and can be discovered and developed. They can...

A rather recent innovation in education is career education. Selected educators have felt that students graduating from the schools have not received adequate information on career opportunities. Further, it is felt that the school students, upon graduation, have not been prepared for selecting a career when entering the labour market. Individuals too frequently have drifted into a career rather than selecting a vocation which is satisfying to the individual.As students progress through the school years, they are to achieve relevant objectives pertaining to understanding, skills, and attitudes in career education. A variety of learning experiences, such as using films, filmstrips, slides, reading materials, resources personnel, and excursions, among others, should aid learners in understanding diverse careers. Work experience for high school students definitely is important in programmes of career education.Questions that can be asked about programmes in career education could be the f...

Children have everything to learn. This should be their main preoccupation in order to prepare themselves for a useful and productive life.Education means three things, to teach how to observe and know rightly the facts on which they have to form a judgement; secondly , to train the children to think fruitfully and soundly; thirdly, to fit the children to use their knowledge and their thought effectively for their own and the common good. Capacity of observation and knowledge, capacity of intelligence and judgement, capacity of action and high character are required for the citizenship of a rational order of society; a general deficiency in any of these is sure source of failure.As the children grow up, they must discover in themselves the thing of things which interest them most and which they are capable of doing well. There are latent faculties to be developed. There are also faculties to be discovered.Children must be taught to like to overcome difficulties, and also that this give...

We have reached a real low point in leadership, lower than at any other time in recent history. A leader, is an individual who upholds what is best for all people, even if it may not be in his or her own interest to do so. A leadership role must be approached as a temporary role, preserving something greater than the self—principles of enduring and lasting value. This embodies an attitude that focuses on the task at hand and not on what the leader may gain from the position. This idea seems at odds with what we see happening around us. In all too many arenas, we see leaders holding nothing in trust for those they purport to serve, instead merely advancing their own ideals and hopes. It is often difficult to tell whether our leaders are serving themselves or us. And it is all too common to find leaders simply helping themselves to privilege, prosperity and power. Where are our leaders leading?Throughout time, leaders who have exhibited the proper kind of custodianship—that is, leaders w...

A young boy was fascinated to see the stirrings of life in a cocoon. The moth inside was struggling to free itself, but the process was slow and tedious. Thinking he would help the moth, he slit the cocoon with his pocketknife, and the insect emerged freely. But it had none of the expected colour, it couldn’t fly, and it soon died. The boy later learned that a moth’s struggle to free itself is a necessary part of its development, and that the process stimulates body fluids that give luster to its wings. Most of us must confess that we find it difficult to endure times of suffering and trial patiently. However, bitter disappointments, painful suffering, and shattering sorrow can be a means of strengthening our character.

The question, often is asked or wondered: Does the colour of one’s skin or religion, or background affect one’s ability to do a job well or give an indication of one’s level of intelligence or motivation? No, of course it doesn’t. So why are ethnic minority people statistically more likely to be unemployed than their counterparts in general category? Do the above factors really influence one’s employability prospects and, if that really is the case, how can one redress the balance?It’s a long time that it is made in some countries illegal to treat a person less favourably than others on ethnic grounds. Yet there are still significant discrepancies for ethnic groups in the society and in the workplace. According to some research, ethnic minority workers receive less pay than their other counterparts, and are more likely to be unemployed.In essence, people should not be discriminated in the fields of employment, education, training, housing and the provision of goods, facilities and serv...

Successful management practices are regularly emulated and imbibed by Educational Institutions which are now functioning like corporate houses and like them are employing standardized methods, standardized application with expectation of uniform products. Education however should not be only product oriented and neither should there be any insistence on a uniform output because we do not produce bottled drinks in our institutions !Have our educational institutions become like production houses and the students like products, where all that matter is just the scores and not the overall development ? it is an accepted truth today that students differ as individuals and especially as individual learners. Their styles of learning are different; their backgrounds are different, namely, culture, religion, language. They are different in their intelligence. Despite this, a closer look of education reform reveals that almost all changes mainly focus on mechanism of improvement of test scores o...

Globalization and the attendant concerns about poverty and inequality have become a focus of discussion in a way that few other topics, except for international terrorism or global warming, have. Most people have a strong opinion on globalization, and all of them express an interest in the well-being of the world's poor. The financial press and influential international officials confidently assert that global free markets expand the horizons for the poor, whereas activist-protesters hold the opposite belief with equal intensity. Yet the strength of people's conviction is often in inverse proportion to the amount of robust factual evidence they have.As is common in contentious public debates, different people mean different things by the same word. Some interpret "globalization" to mean the global reach of communications technology and capital movements, some think of the outsourcing by domestic companies in rich countries, and others see globalization as a byword for...

Development refers to improvements in the conditions of people's lives, such as health, education, and income. It occurs at different rates in different countries. The U.S. underwent its own version of development when it became an independent nation in 1776:The average American earned about $1,000 a year in today's dollars, compared with $30,000 today.One in five children died before their first birthday, compared with about one in 143 today.Less than 50% of white children, and almost no black children, went to school; today almost all American children finish primary school.On average, Americans were about four times richer than the people of the world's poorest countries; they are 100 times richer today.Poor countries have experienced improvement as well. Over the past 50 years, there has been more progress in reducing poverty and improving health and education than at any other time in history. Over this period:Diseases such as smallpox and river blindness that formerly...

In the rich world globalization had driven the wedge between social classes, while in the poor world, the main divide is between countries: those that adjusted to globalization and, in many areas, prospered and those that adjusted badly and, in many cases, collapsed.Indeed the Third World was never a bloc the way that that the first and second worlds were. But it was united by its opposition to colonialism and dislike for being used as a battlefield of the two then-dominant ideologies. As the Second World collapsed and globalization took off, the latter rationale evaporated, and a few countries, most notably India and China, accelerated their growth rates significantly, enjoying the fruits of freer trade and larger capital flows. And although these two countries adapted well to globalization, there is little doubt that their newfound relative prosperity opened many new fissure lines. Inequality between coastal and inland provinces, as well as between urban and rural areas, skyrocketed ...

Historically, the dominant power tends to support globalization as a way to increase the ambit of its influence, expand trade and gain economic advantage, co-opt new citizens and possibly show the advantages. This was the case with the Roman, British and now American-led globalizations. But recently, the rich West - which saw globalization as a prelude to "the end of history" - is having second thoughts.Two fears drive this unease with globalization: The first is a fear of job loss due to competition from low-wage countries. The second is the fear of ethnic and cultural dilution due to increased immigration.The cause of the first fear is a fast reemergence on the world stage of China and India. For students of history, the rise of China and India is not a surprise. The two countries are just recapturing the ground lost during the 19th and most of the 20th century. Before the Industrial Revolution, China's and India's combined output accounted for one half of the world...

Educational technology includes all educational resources --- men and materials, methods and techniques, means and media in an integrated and systematic manner to optimize learning. Learning not teaching is the crucial task of the educational process. Technology is one component in this process and can help make learning easy and interesting.A large number of schools have gone headlong into computer education --- not really computer-based education --- and usually what this means is learning how to use a computer for different tasks, including mathematical operations (statistics, spreadsheets, geometric modeling) and desktop publishing (bringing out a class magazine or making posters).Computer-based education, on the other hand, implies the use of computers as a means to educate. Lessons are designed using the capacities of the computer to stimulate, organize information, and present materials that are visual, auditory and text-based, all within the same frame. Such computer-based educ...

In the rich world globalization had driven the wedge between social classes, while in the poor world, the main divide is between countries: those that adjusted to globalization and, in many areas, prospered and those that adjusted badly and, in many cases, collapsed.Indeed the Third World was never a bloc the way that that the first and second worlds were. But it was united by its opposition to colonialism and dislike for being used as a battlefield of the two then-dominant ideologies. As the Second World collapsed and globalization took off, the latter rationale evaporated, and a few countries, most notably India and China, accelerated their growth rates significantly, enjoying the fruits of freer trade and larger capital flows. And although these two countries adapted well to globalization, there is little doubt that their newfound relative prosperity opened many new fissure lines. Inequality between coastal and inland provinces, as well as between urban and rural areas, skyrocketed ...

A rather recent innovation in education is career education. Selected educators have felt that students graduating from the schools have not received adequate information on career opportunities. Further, it is felt that the school students, upon graduation, have not been prepared for selecting a career when entering the labour market. Individuals too frequently have drifted into a career rather than selecting a vocation which is satisfying to the individual.As students progress through the school years, they are to achieve relevant objectives pertaining to understanding, skills, and attitudes in career education. A variety of learning experiences, such as using films, filmstrips, slides, reading materials, resources personnel, and excursions, among others, should aid learners in understanding diverse careers. Work experience for high school students definitely is important in programmes of career education.Questions that can be asked about programmes in career education could be the f...

We hear about human rights constantly these days, often in a global context. Yet according to Eleanor Roosevelt, they begin “in small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world.” She went on to say in her address at the 1948 UN Commission on Human Rights that “they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.” The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, now more than 50 years old, was not the first attempt to legislate human rights on an international scale. The post–World War I League of Nations Covenant required members to “endeavour to secure and maintain fair and humane conditions of labour for men, women, and children,” “se...

We have reached a real low point in leadership, lower than at any other time in recent history. A leader, is an individual who upholds what is best for all people, even if it may not be in his or her own interest to do so. A leadership role must be approached as a temporary role, preserving something greater than the self—principles of enduring and lasting value. This embodies an attitude that focuses on the task at hand and not on what the leader may gain from the position. This idea seems at odds with what we see happening around us. In all too many arenas, we see leaders holding nothing in trust for those they purport to serve, instead merely advancing their own ideals and hopes. It is often difficult to tell whether our leaders are serving themselves or us. And it is all too common to find leaders simply helping themselves to privilege, prosperity and power. Where are our leaders leading? Throughout time, leaders who have exhibited the proper kind of custodianship—that is, leaders ...

Children have everything to learn. This should be their main preoccupation in order to prepare themselves for a useful and productive life.Education means three things, to teach how to observe and know rightly the facts on which they have to form a judgement; secondly , to train the children to think fruitfully and soundly; thirdly, to fit the children to use their knowledge and their thought effectively for their own and the common good. Capacity of observation and knowledge, capacity of intelligence and judgement, capacity of action and high character are required for the citizenship of a rational order of society; a general deficiency in any of these is sure source of failure.As the children grow up, they must discover in themselves the thing of things which interest them most and which they are capable of doing well. There are latent faculties to be developed. There are also faculties to be discovered.Children must be taught to like to overcome difficulties, and also that this give...