It is not innovation that matters, it is agreement. And we might need innovation to reach agreement.
This time based on the ‘Big Five’ from YouJustGetMe.
Results are presented as ten large balls, two for each dimension.
Conscientiousness: Disciplined and Casual
Openness: Alternative and Traditional
Agreeableness: Cooperative and Competitive
Extraversion: Extraverted and Intraverted
Neuroticism: Unemotional and Neurotic
The questionnaire is quick and easy. The results are immediate and are accompanied by a narrative.
Hat tip to Gumption.
Wave your hand. And look at it. If you can see it, you can learn. But how can we learn emotion? Well, by watching your own MRI scan.
“Rumour rhymes with ‘ruma’, Shona for bite. Harare has literally been bitten by rumours. Our city is famed for many things but one thing specifically. The ability to turn no news into headlines. The skill of spinning no knowledge into street wisdom. The hustle of selling unconfirmed stories on a hungry parallel market. Our only non-state daily newspaper was bombed so the people’s paper is the people’s stories, nyayas that circulate like a whisper at a bottle store. Mugabe has fled to Malaysia. Morgan has 68% of the presidential vote. Mujuru has lost her seat. Morgan’s win is being broadcast live on TV. A people starved of truth begin to manufacture their own. So truths roam Harare like street kids, tapping your window at every robot. Like an undelivered text message notification ringing on your phone. Constantly.
But just minutes ago some rumours may have become reality. Our hopes may be backed up by facts. When Morgan held his press conference at the Meikles Hotel he told us that after years of struggle we have a new challenge – that of governance. The need to start to restructure and stabilize our country. MDC believe they have clinched victory. Morgan has never appeared so joyous. Once again the rumours begin to bite. MDC is said to be in talks with the armed forces and ZANU about negotiating a hand over of power. Morgan denies the rumours. So, many things are in the air. Hope and rumours. And once again the joy and the certainty of the press conference need to get out into the townships. The people need to taste the joy of a dream becoming reality. They need to be ready to defend their victorious dreams. Otherwise tomorrow will just be another day of spoken headlines and hustled truths.”
For the source.
UPDATE: Comrade Fatso has a new site.
PS Zemantra found the picture on Flickr. I haven’t asked the photographer’s permission because I can’t find the contact link in Flickr. I hearby ask your permission and endorsement. Please let me know if you object. Many thanks.
“You see, to be a leader means to be a dealer, a purveyor and a deliverer of hope.
And it is our job – yours and mine – to be deliverers of hope. Because we believe, in this school, that all can and will lead and because I believe in the talent and potential of the young men sitting before me – I believe in that hope.”
David Knowles, St Stithians.
Hat tip to Ideate.
UPDATE
Heard on SWRadioAfrica, the voice of independent Zimbabwe beaming out of London, as we wait for news from Harare.
I would go further. Leadership is about thriving on differences!
Cheri Baker from The Enlightened Manager said something similar today about emerging political styles in the USA.
Refreshing interface, immediate report, advice, trait ratings and logo/description to put on your site.
The original post was about a personality test but a lot of people arrive here trying to find out the meaning of being good looking. So I’ve edited the page and added the key psychological points of being good looking.
It seems to me that most people know if they are good looking or not. We also know that some people are born with great attributes: they have symmetrical faces and are tall and well proportioned.
For the rest of us, this is what we can DO about being great looking:
And it will show. People will notice you and want to talk to you. Which will make you smile!
Enjoy! Five steps. Smile. Listen. Spruce up. Exercise. Gratitude.
And let me know if this list helped. Thanks for coming by here. Evey page hit brightens my day.
There is an excellent article on Gen Y from The Office NewB on Brazen Careerist today. And who says Gen Y can’t write! It sums up the influences on Gen Y and shows the potential of their generation.
1. Getting along in an equal world.
2. Taking personal responsibility for the economic viability & sustainability of our work and lifestyle.
3. Re-centering our lives on our families and community life.
4. Fully exploring new technologies.
5. Extending self-determination to our relationships in the workplace.
I recently had an assignment in which I worked intensively with a large Gen Y client-base for three years. As a Gen X’er, I had a steep learning curve, and it is one that I glad I made.
I’ve found Gen Y refreshing. It is true that they want information to be personally meaningful. But who doesn’t? Gen Y simply live at a time when technology has allowed democracy to step forward. They are showing us the way.
I’ve also recently had some bad experiences with Gen Y as leaders and I asked around the blogosphere for their thoughts. This is important. Many Gen Yers are already in positions of responsibility and I have particularly disliked they way they are unable to relate to people with experience. I don’t mean kow-tow; I mean to relate; to acknowledge the existence of others; to inquire and to learn from others. These failures challenged my understanding that Gen Y are good at working in teams.
Gen Y are good at dealing with distributed decision making, not teams per se. In distributed decision making, the final conclusion is found by repeated iterations. Consensus is marked by a majority vote in some cases and supported in others by the absence of another compelling argument.
Distributed decision making does not require a leader to encourage involvement. The distributed system has been set up by a games designer, or puppet master, whom players acknowledge, implicitly but do not communicate with directly. Leadership in these systems moves around depending on who is contributing the most interesting solution. The games designers and puppet masters also respond to the players as the game unfolds.
In a conventional workplace, leadership does not move around. It is vested predominantly in one person and that person has an obligation to find the information relevant to the problem. The system assumes the leader has the cognitive and behavioral framework to detect and to collate all the information.
It is not and never has been a feature of command and control to ignore subordinates. That would be so silly.
If the system is malfunctioning and the ‘boss’ is not sufficiently capable to recognize and organize all the relevant information, or if the people put in those positions don’t expect to play that role, or if they problems we are addressing are too complex for any one person to function in that way, then we may need to overhaul either our processes or our structures.
I wonder if anyone else has a view one this?
UPDATE: Update of my views on managing in the age of Gen Y
Bronze is earned from listening to our own voice.
Silver is earned from incomplete conversations.
Gold is earned from voices that are struggling to be heard.
In addition to aiming for gold: to hear the voice struggling to be heard,
2. Be patient with silence.
1. Still our own inner voice
Jill is a brain scientist who had a stroke quite young. She describes what it felt like to lose the left side of her brain which governs our serial processing – our inner voice. She cries when describes what it was like to be fully aware of the world via the right parallel processing side of her brain. I think they were tears of wonder (though I am sure it was pretty scary too).
I think implicitly she was advocating the idea that we put far too much emphasis on our left brain, serial processing, “I”, “to do” list brain, and not enough attention to what is happening almost imperceptibly around us.
Paulo Coelho advocates similar idea. I have found the idea of looking towards the horizon quite useful and particularly of listening to sounds as far as I can hear.
In my experience, some people who are very in tune with the world don’t reflect much. I think that those of us who are have strong serial processors need to make time to relax, reflect and recreate. In the hurly-burly of the world, we can become increasingly inefficient otherwise.
I don’t think so. Indeed the opposite. It allows us to hear ourselves too.
Our serial ‘doing’ brain is important. It is what we use during “flow”, I think. Maybe a neuro-scientist could comment on that. When we are in the flow of action, we aren’t listening to anything outside that activity
The big dilemma is when we get caught in one or the other!
I am just finishing a sabbatical and have the most awful resistance to getting going again. I know from experience that the adrenaline high of action will take me away from the peace of reflection, and when I am in that place, I will resist coming down.
Have you experienced anything like that?
A pdf on how to run a workshop to help a group define its BHAG: here
A comprehensive yet readable approach from Hawaii: here
David Bolchover, who wrote The Living Dead: Switched Off Zone Out – The Shocking Truth About Office Life and guest posted for the Timesonline, wrote on his book blurb that he left corporate life to do something with his life!
I also got an email for an organization that specializes in Career Shifts – you know those awkward career changes when you are going to do something different. They quote Howard Thurman whom I am sure David would like too.
British poet David Whyte says similarly:
If you can’t bunk out to the nearest bookstore to look for one of his books of prose or poetry, spend part of Easter listing all the times at work and play that you have felt truly alive.
It would be great to hear which of those you could sneak into your work life . . .
UPDATE:
To sneak good stuff into your job, look for Dr Rao speaking to Googletalk (on YouTube). There is no reason to be in job that is deadening. But it might be way we “hold the conversation” that needs to change.