Wednesday, November 26, 2008

when it rains, it pours

When something good or bad occurs, it usually occurs more than once and often within a short period of time.

  • It hadn't rained for over two months. Now it has started raining and it has been raining for a week nontstop. When it rains, it pours.
When it rains, it pours means that when something happens after a long time, it happens in large amounts.
  • It looks like everyone in our department is sick again, and all at the same time. When it rains, it pours.
  • Sometimes we have no customers for two or three hours, then suddenly we get 20 people all at once. When it rains, it pours.

Friday, November 21, 2008

For crying out loud!

Something you say when you're annoyed or upset, angry. Used to express annoyance or astonishment. It is a euphemism for "For Christ's sake".

Oh, for crying out loud, why won't you listen to me!

For crying out loud, can't you do anything right?

No, I haven't bought her a present yet. Her birthday is a month away, for crying out loud.

Let's get going, for crying out loud!

For crying out loud! Can't you leave me alone even for a minute!

Thursday, November 20, 2008

worse comes to worst


If the worst possible thing happens; if a situation develops in the most serious or unpleasant way. If the worst possible outcome occurs. This expression is often followed by a solution.

We should be home when you arrive, but worse comes to worst, the neighbours have a spare key and will let you into the house.

If worse comes to worst and Mr. Jones loses the house, he will send his family to his mother's farm.

If worse comes to worst, we shall close the school for a few days.

If worse comes to worst and the budget is not approved, the government will shut down.

Go ahead and go to school with a cold; worse comes to worst the teacher will send you home.

Monday, November 17, 2008

Unfair dismissal: Alvarez Rodrich fired from El Comercio Group

Augusto Alvarez Rodrich has been fired from Peru 21, one of the most successful newspapers in Peru. It is unfortunate that one of the most independent journalists in Peru has stopped being Peru 21 editor. Alvarez Rodrich has mentioned that there have been some editorial discrepancies with El Comercio newspaper stockholders.
I'm hearing through the grapevine that he has being fired because Alvarez was a pain in the neck for Peruvian President Alan Garcia. As a result, his dismissal has been part of a negotiation between the newspaper and the government.
This along with Fernando Ampuero has been the second dismissal from El Comercio Group in a very short time.
Alvarez Rodrich was able to put together a great team of columnists and writers and this made his newspaper a very interesting medium to display a great array of opinions.
This blog (My English Times) and hundreds of thousands of Peruvian newspaper readers are going to miss him a lot. Let's hope there's a brave investor who can give Alvarez Rodrich the opportunity to be in charge of a newspaper soon!
Perublogs Tags:

Friday, November 14, 2008

New English File Listening 1C: Personality adjectives

LISTENING EXERCISE

  • Listen to a man talking about how position in the family has affected his and his family's personality. Which positions does he talk about?

1. oldest child 2. middle child 3. youngest child 4. only child

  • Listen again. Which adjectives does he use describe each person?

himself: not spoilt, not s______, not i______, r_______, o______

his father: r______, b______

  • Listen again reading the transcript. Try to guess the meaning of any words you don't know. Verify with dictionary.

Transcript

I'm an only child. I don't think I was spoilt, but maybe I was. I don't consider myself to be selfish, but I'm probably not very good at seeing things from other people's point of view. Maybe that's because I'm not very imaginative. I am quite responsible and organized though, so probably most of what the psychologist says is true for me.

Er- other people in my family- well my wife is a youngest child. I think she's quite affectionate, that's true, but she certainly isn't lazy -she's one of the most hardworking people I know, and I say she's charming but she's not manipulative.

My dad is and oldest child and I think it's true that he is much more responsible than his brother and sister, and I know they think he was always quite bossy. Actually they still think he is.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Harvard Business IdeaCast: The Science of Human Capital



From Harvard Business School Publishing, 2007.
The Science of Human Capital. Julie Devoll of the Harvard Business School Press, talks with John Budreau, author of Beyond HR: The Science of Human Capital.


JD: This is Julie Devoll from Harvard Business School Press. I’m here today with John Budreau, Research Director at the Center for effective organizations and Professor of Management and Organization in the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. John is coauthor of a new book Beyond HR: The New Science of Human Capital. John, thank you for joining us today.

JB: Thanks for the opportunity Julie.

JD: So your book talks about perhaps the most crucial resource in today’s companies and that is …their people whether is called labor, human capital, talent or some other term. The resource that lies within employees and how they organize this increasingly recognized as critical strategic success and competitive advantage, but while executives know that their talent is important and they build a strategy around their talent that would give them a unique competitive advantage.
One of the problems that you say in the book is that companies traditionally use what you call “a peanut butter approach” in terms of the human resource strategies. Can you talk about what this means and why it’s not working?

JB: You bet, the peanut butter approach metaphor actually came from some of the leaders of companies we were working with and what it means is that very well meaning organizations have adopted principles like “to be fair we need to be equal” and so they approach their talent with the idea that if some people have certain incentives others should have the same incentives. If we’re going to get people engaged we should get everybody engaged and we call that the peanut butter approach because it’s like applying a very good thing equally across the population.
What struck Peter Ramstad and me on the book was…we don’t behave that way with customers, for example, every customer isn’t the subject of maximum advertising; every machine isn’t run at maximum capacity so there’s a different answer in other disciplines rather than just doing the same thing for everyone or maximizing everything.

JD: And one of the things you also say is that the future of talent management would go beyond today’s HR programs, programs like benefits and payroll and training practices and even beyond segmenting talent according to performance or personality, and that seems pretty controversial in terms of how we generally think about HR. Can you talk a little bit about what’s driving this change in Human Resource practices?

JB: Well, first of all, let me say that the attention to great HR practices is a good thing. The metaphor we like to use is that just because we have a discipline of finance and we start to differentiate why we make investments doesn’t mean that fundamental practices like accounting go away, just because we have a discipline like marketing that help us differentiate customer segments doesn’t mean that important practices like sales and advertising go away, so the first thing is to say that those programs and practices in HR going to remain fundamentally important but what it’s going to happen is that they’re going to be embedded within a decision focus approach, as we call it. And the idea is that not only that we understand differences between people’s performance or whether certain individuals have different personalities or whether some people are high potential and others aren’t. The world in front of us suggests that we can differentiate talent pools into talent segments like customer segments. The fundamental question would be "where do improvements and talent performance make the biggest difference to our strategic success?", just like we ask "which customer segments make the biggest difference to our strategic success?"

JD: So as part of having the strategic approach to talent management, one of the first things you recommend that executive make decision around is what you say is the pivotal talent in the organization or the pivot points. Can you talk about these pivot points within the organization and why they matter in terms of talent strategy?

JB: You bet. The question of pivot point is something that comes out in every other discipline so as other disciplines like finance, marketing, operations, research, etc. as they mature they start to begin to focus on optimizing not just maximizing. Like I said, we don’t run every machine at full capacity, we have a particular optimized level of capacity across an assembly line, and the way we find out where changes in any process will make a difference is something like a constraint or a bottle neck or a pivot point. So if you have all your machines running well but there’s one process or machine that doesn’t, fixing that machine so all the others can work well is the critical thing. It’s like a bottle neck in a hose or a bottle neck in a pipe. So what we suggest is that in organizations their strategic pivot points, places where improving the delivery or something makes the biggest difference to your success, and once you find those there are often talent pivot points where improving the performance of talent will make a big difference to those strategic pivot points.
JD: So what I found interesting is what you say that the pivot points in an organization are not the usual suspects so they may not be the leaders or even the top sales people or even technical professionals.

JB: Well I think that’s right. What we see a lot in organizations is a great deal of attention to the same talent pools that everybody else is working on, so if we need more sales it seems logical to invest in our sales people and to train them and select them and reward them. Virtually every leadership group believes that they’re pivotal and so we end up working hard on it improving leadership and building better leaders. There’s nothing wrong with that and those are definitely important. But very often what we find is that in the places no one is looking there may be pivot point that no one‘s found. For example, we might say that pilots in an airline are very very important but the difference between average and super good pilot performance in an airlines is by design not very much. It’s different from the navy where the difference between average and super pilot performance is very very large so the pivot points require that we think about "how does a given role make a difference to our strategy?", and that helps us understand where improving the performance of talent will make the biggest difference, not just where talent is very very important.

JD: One of the company examples you use is Disney and you say that their pivotal positions are actually not the ones we normally think of, and I know I wouldn’t think of Mickey Mouse. Can you talk about Disney’s approach to managing their talent?

JB: Well, that’s exactly right. When I do this exercise and I’ve been doing for about fifteen years, when you think about the Disney Theme Park and you think about "what is the vital critical talent there?", almost everybody answers characters first and they’re absolutely right. Again the idea is to differentiate what’s vital or important from what’s pivotal. Your most vital customer segment may be the people who’ve been purchasing your products for a long time but your most pivotal customer segment may be consumers in China or India or some other place that have great opportunity and potential for sales increases but may not your biggest customers at all.
While at Disney, characters are very important but the difference in performance between Mickey Mouse at the C level and the A level is by design very very small, it’s just too important. On the other hand, there are other positions I'd like to use the metaphor of Sweepers and my favorite story is: a sweeper who stops sweeping, notices that your child is a little sunburned and helps you find a shady spot up the hill where you can watch the parade: that is a critical strategic element that creates great surprise and delight and that sweeper makes much bigger difference if they know how to do that, than the character might make. Now the characters are important but they’re so important that they actually don’t differ very much in performance where as sweepers are pivotal because their difference in performance make a big difference to customers' surprise and delight...

JD: So John what you’re saying is that there seems to have implications for the rest of the people in the organization: the people who aren’t necessarily the sweepers. So how do you recommend managers deal with this? How do they tell their Mickey Mouses of their organizations that they’re not just as pivotal as the sweepers?

JB: That’s a great question and I like the way that you phrased that, because very often what I hear from organizations that are used to a policy that says “to be fair we must be equal” or a word in which they really don’t have a logic for these hard conversations ah is...how can we ever do this?...We just have to treat everybody the same or we wouldn’t want to talk about Mickey Mouse and the Sweeper this way. The answer of course is that fairness doesn’t equal equality but rather Mickey Mouse is very important but important to maintain performance at a very specific level. We can’t have Mickey Mouse innovating because we have to have too many of them in the park. Sweepers, on the other hand, have the freedom to innovate with regard of customer service because of the position they’re in and because of what we need from them.
So the conversation should really be: "If you are in the Mickey Mouse custom you are unbelievable important to us and we are going to reward you and we are going to manage you so that you deliver a very consistent performance", very much like pilots in an aircraft. If you want to have lots of discretion and if you want to have lots of interaction with our guests then you should think about becoming a Sweeper and I know it seems kind of intuitive to say that but it’s not that Mickey Mouse isn’t important but it has an important role with a very specific definition. The sweeper has a different role and once people understand that and once we can have these conversations, I think we start to have a world in which it’s much more like customers. For example, with me, when I buy certain products from certain people I’m not a frequent buyer and so I get a certain level of service and when I fly a certain airline, on other airlines or with other products I get a very high level of service. We all understand that. It may not feel great when were purchasing a product we don’t purchase that often we don’t quite get the service level we get elsewhere, but we understand that businesses have to optimize their "customer resource" and that we’re part of that. I think we can reach a place where employers can understand that too and we give leaders that power to have logical, principal conversations so that everyone understands that fairness and equality don’t have to be the same.

JD: So in turning around a little bit let’s talk about what this means for the individual worker. What are some tactics that you think the individual workers can do to improve their own visibility within a company and become that pivotal person and how do they start to have those conversations with their managers?

JB: Well that’s a great question. One of the…right now…a lot of the recognition of the importance of these ideas is happening among business leaders and among HR leaders and one of the tasks we have is to help business leaders think more clearly about their strategies and how talent is pivotal to those strategies to identify the difference between a character and a sweeper or a pilot and a gate agent and to understand that "importance" versus "pivoteness" difference but you raise a great point because I think in the future the great power of this idea is when the sweepers know that they’re pivotal when they serve customers or when they help that child find a shady spot up the hill and they understand the difference between the importance of sweeping but the pivoteness of customer service.
So how to become pivotal? Well, I think what we need is for all employees to start asking the question: What is it that I do that makes the biggest difference to the success of this organization? And is that necessarily the thing that’s in my job description?...So if a sweeper discovers that you’re measuring me a lot on how I sweep but I’m finding that customers are more delighted when I can give them great information etcetera, somehow that information needs to get off the channels, managers need to hear it, leaders need to hear it. And in the best organizations we find that this concept of talent pivoteness, this concept of connecting talent with strategy is not just a purview of business leaders, it’s not just a purview of HR, but the whole organization starts to have a language and a logic for seeing these differences including employees who become immensely empowered when they’re allowed to act on their understanding of what’s pivotal and what’s important.
JD: Great John, well thank you for taking the time today to speak with us.

JB: You’re very welcome. Thanks for the opportunity.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

The Next President: New York Times Editorial

From www.nytimes.com

This is one of those moments in history when it is worth pausing to reflect on the basic facts:
An American with the name Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a white woman and a black man he barely knew, raised by his grandparents far outside the stream of American power and wealth, has been elected the 44th president of the United States.
Showing extraordinary focus and quiet certainty, Mr. Obama swept away one political presumption after another to defeat first Hillary Clinton, who wanted to be president so badly that she lost her bearings, and then John McCain, who forsook his principles for a campaign built on anger and fear.
His triumph was decisive and sweeping, because he saw what is wrong with this country: the utter failure of government to protect its citizens. He offered a government that does not try to solve every problem but will do those things beyond the power of individual citizens: to regulate the economy fairly, keep the air clean and the food safe, ensure that the sick have access to health care, and educate children to compete in a globalized world.
Mr. Obama spoke candidly of the failure of Republican economic policies that promised to lift all Americans but left so many millions far behind. He committed himself to ending a bloody and pointless war. He promised to restore Americans’ civil liberties and their tattered reputation around the world.
With a message of hope and competence, he drew in legions of voters who had been disengaged and voiceless. The scenes Tuesday night of young men and women, black and white, weeping and cheering in Chicago and New York and in Atlanta’s storied Ebenezer Baptist Church were powerful and deeply moving.
Mr. Obama inherits a terrible legacy. The nation is embroiled in two wars — one of necessity in Afghanistan and one of folly in Iraq. Mr. Obama’s challenge will be to manage an orderly withdrawal from Iraq without igniting new conflicts so the Pentagon can focus its resources on the real front in the war on terror, Afghanistan.
The campaign began with the war as its central focus. By Election Day, Americans were deeply anguished about their futures and the government’s failure to prevent an economic collapse fed by greed and an orgy of deregulation. Mr. Obama will have to move quickly to impose control, coherence, transparency and fairness on the Bush administration’s jumbled bailout plan.
His administration will also have to identify all of the ways that Americans’ basic rights and fundamental values have been violated and rein that dark work back in. Climate change is a global threat, and after years of denial and inaction, this country must take the lead on addressing it. The nation must develop new, cleaner energy technologies, to reduce greenhouse gases and its dependence on foreign oil.
Mr. Obama also will have to rally sensible people to come up with immigration reform consistent with the values of a nation built by immigrants and refugees.
There are many other urgent problems that must be addressed. Tens of millions of Americans lack health insurance, including some of the country’s most vulnerable citizens — children of the working poor. Other Americans can barely pay for their insurance or are in danger of losing it along with their jobs. They must be protected.
Mr. Obama will now need the support of all Americans. Mr. McCain made an elegant concession speech Tuesday night in which he called on his followers not just to honor the vote, but to stand behind Mr. Obama. After a nasty, dispiriting campaign, he seemed on that stage to be the senator we long respected for his service to this country and his willingness to compromise.
That is a start. The nation’s many challenges are beyond the reach of any one man, or any one political party.
Published November 4, 2008

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Barack Obama: early life and career

Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., from Kenya, and Ann Dunham, a white American from Wichita, Kansas of mainly English, Scottish and Irish descent.
His parents met in 1960 while attending the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was a foreign student. The couple married on February 2, 1961; they separated when Obama was two years old and subsequently divorced in 1964. Obama's father returned to Kenya and saw his son only once more before dying in an automobile accident in 1982.
After her divorce, Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, and the family moved to Soetoro's home country of Indonesia in 1967, where Obama attended local schools in Jakarta until he was ten years old. He then returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents while attending Punahou School from the fifth grade in 1971 until his graduation from high school in 1979.
Obama's mother returned to Hawaii in 1972 for several years, and then in 1977 went back to Indonesia, where she worked as an anthropological field worker. She stayed there most of the rest of her life, returning to Hawaii in 1994. She died of ovarian cancer in 1995.
As an adult Obama admitted that during high school he used marijuana, cocaine, and alcohol. After high school, Obama moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at Occidental College for two years. He then transferred to Columbia College in New York City, where he majored in political science with a specialization in international relations. Obama graduated with a B.A. from Columbia in 1983, then the following year worked for a year at the Business International Corporation and then at the New York Public Interest Research Group.
After four years in New York City, Obama moved to Chicago, where he was hired as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland (Roseland, West Pullman, and Riverdale) on Chicago's far South Side, and worked there for three years from June 1985 to May 1988.
During his three years as the DCP's director, its staff grew from one to thirteen and its annual budget grew from $70,000 to $400,000, with accomplishments including helping set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization in Altgeld Gardens. Obama also worked as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing institute.
In mid-1988, he traveled for the first time to Europe for three weeks and then for five weeks in Kenya, where he met many of his Kenyan relatives for the first time.
Obama entered Harvard Law School in late 1988. At the end of his first year, he was selected, based on his grades and a writing competition, as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. In February 1990, in his second year, he was elected president of the Law Review, a full-time volunteer position functioning as editor-in-chief and supervising the Law Review's staff of eighty editors. Obama's election as the first black president of the Law Review was widely reported. During his summers, he returned to Chicago where he worked as a summer associate at the law firms of Sidley & Austin in 1989 and Hopkins & Sutter in 1990. After graduating with a Juris Doctor (J.D.) magna cum laude from Harvard in 1991, he returned to Chicago.
The publicity from his election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review led to a publishing contract and advance for a book about race relations. In an effort to recruit him to their faculty, the University of Chicago Law School provided Obama with a fellowship and an office to work on his book. He originally planned to finish the book in one year, but it took much longer as the book evolved into a personal memoir. In order to work without interruptions, Obama and his wife, Michelle, traveled to Bali where he wrote for several months. The manuscript was finally published in mid-1995 as Dreams from My Father.
Obama directed Illinois' Project Vote from April to October 1992, a voter registration drive with a staff of ten and seven hundred volunteers; it achieved its goal of registering 150,000 of 400,000 unregistered African-Americans in the state, and led to Crain's Chicago Business naming Obama to its 1993 list of "40 under Forty" powers to be.

Beginning in 1992, Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years, being first classified as a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996, and then as a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004.
He also, in 1993, joined Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a twelve-attorney law firm specializing in civil rights litigation and neighborhood economic development, where he was an associate for three years from 1993 to 1996, then of counsel from 1996 to 2004, with his law license becoming inactive in 2002.
Obama was a founding member of the board of directors of Public Allies in 1992, resigning before his wife, Michelle, became the founding executive director of Public Allies Chicago in early 1993. He served from 1994 to 2002 on the board of directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago, which in 1985 had been the first foundation to fund the Developing Communities Project, and also from 1994 to 2002 on the board of directors of The Joyce Foundation. Obama served on the board of directors of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge from 1995 to 2002, as founding president and chairman of the board of directors from 1995 to 1999. He also served on the board of directors of the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Center for Neighborhood Technology, and the Lugenia Burns Hope Center.

(From www.wikipedia.org)