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Biochemistry is pure purpose, passion and dedication to innovation

Every now and again, we hear the clichéd question, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ or ‘What is the purpose of life?’ or ‘Why are we born?’. In most cases, we have our own agenda on what our purpose in life is.

To become a scientist today, you need experience in experimentation – but getting lab experience if you’re an undergraduate can be incredibly difficult.
Biochemistry itself determines, to a large extent, the sort of passion you have in you towards Biochemistry and as you know with success, you require a passion, a vision, a plan an objective.

Why I love Biochemistry

From biotechnology and digital media to sustainable energy and cloud computing, almost everything today is somehow affected—and sometimes entirely reshaped—by scientific and technological advances.

As a society, we have come to take the fruits of science for granted, such as our use of computers, our access to running water and electricity, and our dependence on various forms of transportation and communication. But all such benefits follow from the discoveries and inventions of scientists as they pursue deep insights into the workings of nature and its materials.

Some scientists are enormously influential as culture critics or public intellectuals. In this respect, figures like Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss, or Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould a generation back, come to mind.

Biochemists study the structure, composition, chemical processes and chemical reactions in living organisms. They analyse the chemical reactions in the cells and tissues of living things, study the expression of genes, and research on the effects of food, medicine and other substances on living tissues. Biochemistry is an interdisciplinary field and encompasses elements of molecular biology, molecular genetics, microbiology, and organic and inorganic chemistry. Pure research in biochemistry is conducted to further human knowledge of the subject while applied research is conducted to solve practical problems.

The work of biochemists is applicable to a variety of fields like medicine, food science, agriculture and industry. In human and veterinary medicine, biochemists analyze drug function and mechanism, and help in the development of new drugs. Biochemists engaged in agriculture and food science determine the chemical composition of foods to explore different sources of nutritious food, and study the effects of herbicides and other chemicals on crop plants. They use advanced tools and techniques like radioactive isotopes, spectrophotometers, centrifuges, electron microscopes and specialized software to perform experiments.

When I was younger, I remember studying the work of Louis Pasteur, a French chemist and microbiologist who developed the first vaccines for rabies and anthrax. He is also credited with the invention of the technique of treating milk and wine to stop bacterial contamination, a process named “pasteurisation” after him.

One of the pioneers in the field of microbiology, Pasteur, along with Ferdinand Cohn and Robert Koch, is regarded as one of the three main founders of bacteriology. Born as the son of a tanner who had served in the Napoleonic Wars, Louis grew up listening to his father’s patriotic tales which instilled in him a deep love for his country. As a young boy he loved to draw and paint, but his parents wanted him to focus on his studies. He was an average student who even failed in his first attempt to clear the entrance test for École Normale Supérieur though he eventually went on complete his doctorate.

In his career as a chemist he disproved many of the long-held erroneous “scientific” beliefs such as the concept of spontaneous generation. He received international acclaim for developing the first vaccination against rabies and for his seminal work in the field of germ theory. Although much renowned for his ground-breaking scientific works, Pasteur’s life has also been the subject of several controversies.

You have to feel nostalgic when you start to think of some of the greatest discoveries ever created, and just maybe without these genius biochemists we may not even have the revolutionary world that exists today, here are some of those great discoveries:

1. Galileo Galilei (1564 to 1642)
Legend has it that in order to test how gravity worked, Galileo dropped two balls, a heavy one and a light one, from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, showing that they landed at the same time. Historians doubt this – because his actual experiment was much better.

The Italian carved a groove down the centre of a board about 20 feet long and 10 inches wide. Then he propped it at an angle and timed how quickly the balls rolled down the track. What he discovered was that the distance the ball travels is proportional to the square of the time that has elapsed. But how, in an age before clocks, could Galileo measure this so precisely? He probably used music. Along the ball’s path, he placed cat-gut frets, like those on a lute. As the rolling ball clicked against the frets, Galileo sang a tune, using the upbeats to time the motion and discover a new law.

2. William Harvey (1578 to 1657)
Galen had taught that the body contains two separate vascular systems: a blue “vegetative” fluid, the elixir of nourishment and growth, coursed through the veins, while a bright red “vital” fluid travelled through the arteries, activating the muscles and stimulating motion. Invisible spirits, or “pneuma”, caused the fluids to slosh back and forth like the tides. The heart just went along for the ride, expanding and contracting like a bellows.

Harvey was dubious. Cutting open a snake, he used a forceps to pinch the main vein, or vena cava, just before it entered the heart. The space downstream from the obstruction emptied of blood, while the heart grew paler and smaller, as though it were about to die. When Harvey released the grip, the heart refilled and sprung back to life. Pinching the heart’s main artery had the opposite effect: the space between heart and forceps became gorged with blood, inflating like a balloon. It was the heart, not invisible spirits, that was the driving motor, pushing red blood to the extremities of the body, where it passed into the bluish veins and returned to the heart for rejuvenation. There was one kind of blood and it moved in a circle: it circulated.

3. Isaac Newton (1642 to 1727)
In Newton’s day, Europe’s great scientists believed that white light was pure and fundamental. When it bounced off a coloured object or passed through a tinted liquid or glass, it became stained somehow with colour – whatever “colour” was. Newton, holed up in a dark room at his family farm in Woolsthorpe, turned the idea on its head. He cut a hole in his window shutter and held a prism in the path of the sun, spreading the light into an oblong spectrum.

Then he funnelled the spectrum through a second prism. White again. Finally, he allowed the colours to pass, one by one, through the second prism. Starting at the red end and progressing toward the blue, each colour was bent a little more by the glass. Light, Newton had discovered, “consists of rayes differently refrangible”. It was white that was the mongrel – not just another colour, but a combination of them all, a “heterogeneous mixture of differently refrangible rayes”.

4. Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743 to 1794)
In the 18th century, the conventional wisdom was that things burned because they contained something called phlogiston. Set a piece of wood on fire and it exuded this mysterious essence, leaving behind a pile of ash. Wood, it logically followed, was composed of phlogiston and ash.

Likewise, heating a metal under an intense flame left a whitish brittle substance, or calx. Metal was thus composed of phlogiston and calx. But Lavoisier was troubled by one thing: with the phlogiston expelled, the calx was heavier than the original metal. How could phlogiston weigh less than zero? By cooking mercury in a flask, he showed that, as the calx formed, something was sucked from the surrounding air. He isolated the gas and lit a taper, noting that it burned “with a dazzling splendour”. Calx was not metal without phlogiston, but metal combined with what Lavoisier would name oxygen. Left behind in the flask was a gas that extinguished flames – what we now call nitrogen. Fire and rust produced similar reactions. Lavoisier had discovered the nature of oxidation – and the chemical composition of the air.

5. Luigi Galvani (1737 to 1798)
One day in Bologna, Galvani was startled to see a dismembered frog’s leg twitch when an assistant cranked a static electricity generator on the far side of the laboratory. The same effect occurred during lightning storms. Even more remarkably, Galvani found, the frog’s leg would move, seemingly of its own accord, as it hung from a hook, even in the clearest weather. He concluded that some kind of animal electricity was involved. His compatriot Alessandro Volta was just as sure that the electricity was non-biological, produced by the touching of two different metals: the frog’s leg had hung on a brass hook from an iron rail.

Though neither man could quite see it, they were dancing around a single truth. Volta confirmed that electricity can indeed come from two metals – he had invented the battery. But Galvani went on to show that there is also electricity in the body.
Taking a dissected frog, he nudged a severed nerve against another using a probe made of glass. No metal was involved, but when nerve touched nerve, the muscle contracted, as surely as if someone had closed a switch.

6. Michael Faraday (1791 to 1867)
In his youth, Faraday had performed a suite of experiments showing the linkage between electricity and magnetism, inventing, along the way, the electric motor and the dynamo. But by the time he was 53, he had fallen into a deep depression.
Maybe it was a barrage of flirtatious correspondence from Lady Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Byron, that snapped him out of his funk: whatever the cause, he decided to push the unification a step further, and show that electricity and magnetism are related to light.

Using an Argand oil lamp, Faraday projected polarised light through a block of glass, alongside of which sat a powerful electromagnet. Holding a polarising filter, called a Nicol prism, to his eye, he rotated it until the light was extinguished. Then he switched on the current. The image of the flame suddenly reappeared. He turned the magnet off and the flame disappeared. The magnetic field, he realised, was twisting the light beam – and if the polarity of the field was reversed, the light beam rotated the other way. Faraday had unified two more forces, demonstrating that light was actually a form of electromagnetism.

7. James Joule (1818 to 1889)
Lavoisier had done away with phlogiston, but before his death he had introduced the idea of caloric, his name for an invisible substance – a “subtle fluid” – said to be the carrier of heat.
Put a metal poker in a fire, he argued, and the caloric will rise up the shaft until you can feel the warmth in the handle. According to this theory, the reason something gets hot when you rub it is because you abrade the surface and let some caloric out.

But why, no matter how long you rubbed, did the heat keep coming? Either there was an infinite supply of caloric in every object or, as Joule suspected, heat was something else altogether. With a rigging of pulleys and weights, he spun a paddle wheel inside a vessel of water and carefully measured the change in temperature. The motion of the paddle made the water warmer, and the relationship was precise: raising one pound of the liquid by one degree took 772 foot-pounds of work. Joule had discovered that heat was not a thing. It was a form of motion.

8. A A Michelson (1852 to 1931)
For a Navy man such as Michelson, it was unthinkable that the Earth could be adrift in the infinitude with no landmarks to measure by. So he set out to prove the existence of the aether, the fixed backdrop of the universe and the substance in which our planet swam as it moved through space. In his apparatus, two beams of light travelled in perpendicular directions. The beam moving upstream – with the earth’s orbit – should, he predicted, be slowed by the wind of the aether, while the other beam should be less effected. By comparing their velocities with an interferometer, Michelson would calculate the motion of the Earth against the heavens. But something was wrong: the speed of the two beams was the same. With help from Edward Morley, Michelson made the measurements much more precisely. Still there was not a hint of aether. In fact, the experiment was a beautiful failure.

As Einstein went on to show, there can be no fixed space or even fixed time. As we move through the universe, our measuring sticks shrink and stretch, our clocks run slower and faster – all to preserve the one true standard, which is not the aether, but the speed of light.

9. Ivan Pavlov (1849 to 1936)
Contrary to legend, Pavlov hardly ever used bells in his experiments with salivating dogs. His animals were more discriminating. In his “Tower of Silence”, sealed from distractions, he and his assistants conditioned the animals to distinguish between objects rotating clockwise or counter-clockwise, between a circle and an ellipse, even between subtle shades of gray.

But for his most remarkable experiment, he used music. First, a dog was trained to salivate when it heard an ascending scale, but not a descending one. But what, Pavlov wondered, would happen if the animal listened to the other combinations of the same notes? The melodies were played and the spittle collected. Through simple conditioning, the dog had categorised the music it heard into two groups, depending on whether the pitches were predominantly rising or falling. The mind had lost a bit of its mystery, Pavlov had shown how learning was a matter of creatures forming new connections in a living machine.

10. Robert Millikan (1868 to 1953)
By bending a cathode ray with an electrical field, Cambridge scholar J?J Thomson had shown electricity to be a form of matter, and measured the ratio of its charge to its mass. It followed that electricity was made of particles, but to clinch the case someone needed to isolate and measure one.

In Millikan’s laboratory in Chicago, two round brass plates, the top one with a hole drilled through the centre, were mounted on a stand and illuminated from the side by a bright light. Then the plates were connected to a 1,000-volt battery. With a perfume atomiser, Millikan sprayed a mist of oil above the apparatus and watched through a telescope as some of the droplets – they looked like little stars – fell into the area between the plates. As he tweaked the voltage, he watched as some drops were pushed slowly upward while others were pulled down. Their passage through the atomiser had ionised them, giving the drops negative or positive charges. By timing their movement with a stopwatch, Millikan showed that charge, like pocket change, came in discrete quantities. He had found the electron.

Biochemistry is fast developing into an extremely important subject. Forming the basis of a great deal of research, its study can make for a successful career offering more alternatives than many other streams of science.

Its applications are of vital significance to the fields of medicine, diagnostics, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, microbiology, veterinary, agricultural and dairy sciences.

Biochemists study the structure and function of enzymes, proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and their metabolic processes, molecular basis of the action of genes, etc. Biochemical engineering harnesses the knowledge of living organisms and systems to create safe and efficient processes. Mainly concerned with biological changes, it is an essential input in the production of pharmaceuticals, foodstuff and waste treatment.

There is an increasing demand for biochemists involved in biochemical genetic research all over the world, especially for those with a specialisation in cell biology, genetics, proteomics, developmental chemistry, organic and medical chemistry, biochemical methods and research. Openings for biochemists exist in R & D in scientific departments in industry, public sector laboratories, universities and hospitals.

It is clear the world needs more biochemists for evolution and revolutionary creations of innovation across its applications.

As Donald J. Cram, American chemist who shared the 1987 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, once said:

“Few scientists acquainted with the chemistry of biological systems at the molecular level can avoid being inspired. Evolution has produced chemical compounds exquisitely organized to accomplish the most complicated and delicate of tasks. Many organic chemists viewing crystal structures of enzyme systems or nucleic acids and knowing the marvels of specificity of the immune systems must dream of designing and synthesizing simpler organic compounds that imitate working features of these naturally occurring compounds.”

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Do we really understand the waves of Economics?

Do we really understand the waves of Economics?

For most people, economics is all about money and finance and issues of supply and demand. While these are important elements, economics is about much more. Economics provides a framework for understanding the actions and decisions of individuals, businesses and governments. It provides a means to understand interactions in a market-driven society and for analysing government policies that affect the families, jobs and lives of citizens

If you watch the news at all, you will probably hear the word ‘economy’ branded in many contexts. But if you are like many people, you may not understand what economics is and why it matters so much.

According to the American Economics Association (AEA), “Economics can be defined in a few different ways. It’s the study of scarcity, the study of how people use resources and respond to incentives, or the study of decision-making. It often involves topics like wealth and finance, but it is not all about money. Economics is a broad discipline that helps us understand historical trends, interpret today’s headlines, and make predictions about the coming years.”

Economics may seem obtuse in the abstract. However, it has very powerful real-world implications. Specifically, according to the AEA, economics can help us answer many big questions, such as why some countries are rich while others are poor; why men earn more than women; how data can help us make sense of the world; what causes recessions; and why we ignore information that could be used toward better decision-making.

Economics Help provides several examples of times when economics come into play, including dealing with shortages of raw materials; working out how wealth is distributed and redistributed within society; determining the extent to which the government should intervene in the economy; and using principles and measures such as opportunity cost, social efficiency, forecasts, and evaluation.

Friedrich August von Hayek once proposed: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” In this sense, economics lies at the intersection of the natural sciences and the humanities: applying a quantitative, data-driven approach to human behaviour. “As such [it] is one of the most important and relevant skills for the world today, helping us choose wisely when it comes to our personal, social and professional lives,” asserts Financial Express.

In 1998, as the Asian financial crisis was ravaging what had been some of the fastest-growing economies in the world, the New Yorker ran an article describing the international rescue efforts. It profiled the super-diplomat of the day, a big-idea man the Economist had recently likened to Henry Kissinger. The New Yorker went further, noting that when he arrived in Japan in June, this American official was treated “as if he were General [Douglas] MacArthur.”

In retrospect, such reverence seems surprising, given that the man in question, Larry Summers, was a dishevelled, somewhat awkward nerd then serving as the U.S. deputy treasury secretary. His extraordinary status owed, in part, to the fact that the United States was then (and still is) the world’s sole superpower and the fact that Summers was (and still is) extremely intelligent. But the biggest reason for Summers’s welcome was the widespread perception that he possessed a special knowledge that would save Asia from collapse. Summers was an economist.

During the Cold War, the tensions that defined the world were ideological and geopolitical. As a result, the superstar experts of that era were those with special expertise in those areas. And policymakers who could combine an understanding of both, such as Kissinger, George Kennan, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, ascended to the top of the heap, winning the admiration of both politicians and the public.

Once the Cold War ended, however, geopolitical and ideological issues faded in significance, overshadowed by the rapidly expanding global market as formerly socialist countries joined the Western free trade system. All of a sudden, the most valuable intellectual training and practical experience became economics, which was seen as the secret sauce that could make and unmake nations. In 1999, after the Asian crisis abated, Time magazine ran a cover story with a photograph of Summers, U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and the headline “The Committee to Save the World.”

In the three decades since the end of the Cold War, economics has enjoyed a kind of intellectual challenge. It has become first among equals in the social sciences and has dominated most policy agendas as well. Economists have been much sought after by businesses, governments, and society at large, their insights seen as useful in every sphere of life. Popularized economics and economic-type thinking have produced an entire genre of best-selling books. At the root of all this influence is the notion that economics provides the most powerful lens through which to understand the modern world.

The crisis of 2008 may have been the wake-up call, but it was only the latest warning sign. Modern-day economics had been built on certain assumptions: that countries, companies, and people seek to maximize their income above all else, that human beings are rational actors, and that the system works efficiently.

But over the last few decades, compelling new work by scholars such as Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler, and Robert Shiller has begun to show that human beings are not predictably rational; in fact, they’re predictably irrational. This “behavioural revolution” landed a debilitating blow to mainstream economics by arguing that what was perhaps the centrepiece assumption of modern economic theory was not only wrong but, even worse, unhelpful.

Let me be clear: Economics remains a vital discipline, one of the most powerful ways we have to understand the world. Economics remains a vital discipline, one of the most powerful ways we have to understand the world.

Economics promotes understanding of and insight into problems specific to our times, including everything from education and the environment to health care and national security.

“One of the principal jobs for economists is to understand what is happening in the economy and investigate reasons for poverty, unemployment and low economic growth. For example, in a political debate such as – Should, the UK leave the EU? There are many emotional arguments made about immigration. Economic studies can try and evaluate the costs and benefits of free movement of labor.

Economic studies can try to examine the economic effects of immigration. This can help people make a decision about political issues,” says Economics Help

The problems that we want economists to help us solve are more like predicting how leaves will fall on a windy day than predicting how objects will fall in a vacuum. Economic phenomena are affected by a very large number of causal factors of many different kinds.

The world is now facing what observers are calling a “synchronised” growth upswing. What does this mean for the economic “convergence” of developed and developing countries, a topic that lost salience after the Great Recession began a decade ago?

The answer will depend on developing economies’ ability to find and tap new, more advanced sources of growth. In the past, the key engine of convergence was manufacturing. Developing countries that had finally acquired the needed skills and institutions applied advanced-country technologies locally, benefiting from plentiful, low-cost labour.

Rising interest rates, increasing trade tensions, Brexit uncertainty… the world economy in 2019 faces many headwinds, but there are also many positive signs that global growth will continue in the coming year. The incoming and outgoing chief economists at the IMF discuss in this video where we are headed.

Maury Obstfeld, Outgoing Economic Counselor, IMF; Gita Gopinath, Incoming Economic Counselor, IMF; Gerry Rice, Director, Communications Department, IMF

Moreover, today’s cutting-edge technologies – such as robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and bioengineering – are more complex than industrial machinery, and may be more difficult to copy.

And, because intelligent machines can increasingly fill low-wage jobs, developing countries’ cost advantage may have been diminished significantly.

Of course, for robotics and AI to appear in developing-country value chains, including services that rely on frontier technologies, a minimum set of specific skills and infrastructure will be needed. But deploying some new technologies and tasks in the emerging economies may turn out to be no more difficult or costly than in advanced countries.

Here, much will depend on what kind of complementary labour is required. It is often assumed that a pool of very highly skilled labour is crucial to deploy AI. That may be true in some cases, but the opposite may be true in others.

For example, the new labor-displacing technologies could make feasible activities for which there had been insufficient skilled labour. Thus, complete automation can lead to a greater share of an economic activity being located in a developing country.

Another factor that will shape the process of technological upgrading in developing countries is global firms’ willingness to invest. Global market structures and pricing will partly determine the distribution of benefits. But so will countries’ efficiency at learning regulatory lessons, including how to design rules that attract investors, capture important segments of value chains, and secure a sufficiently large share of the gains from innovation. Those countries that learn quickly may actually grow faster than advanced economies, even in high-tech sectors.

Of course, for many countries and sectors, there remains considerable room for traditional catch-up – a process that will likely continue to fuel growth. But it will not be enough to fuel true convergence. For that, developing countries will need to deploy new technologies relatively efficiently, taking into account the role of labour-market skills and regulations. This will not be easy, and we may never return to the “golden age” of convergence that preceded 2007. But new technologies should not be expected to stop convergence, even if, as is likely, they slow it down.

My final word: Economics remains a vital discipline, one of the most powerful ways we have to understand the world. Economics remains a vital discipline, one of the most powerful ways we have to understand the world.
But in the heady days of post-Cold War globalisation, when the world seemed to be dominated by markets and trade and wealth creation, it has become the dominant discipline, the key to understanding modern life. That economics has since slipped from that pedestal is simply a testament to the fact that the world is messy.

The social sciences differ from the hard sciences because “the subjects of our study think,” said Herbert Simon, one of the few scholars who excelled in both. As we try to understand the world of the next three decades, we will desperately need economics but also political science, sociology, psychology, and perhaps even literature and philosophy. Students of each should retain some element of humility.

As Immanuel Kant, an influential German philosopher, in his doctrine of transcendental idealism said:

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

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Will globalisation actually happen?

The age of globalisation began on the day the Berlin Wall came down. From that moment in 1989, the trends evident in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s accelerated: the free movement of capital, people and goods; trickle-down economics; a much diminished role for nation states; and a belief that market forces, now unleashed, were unstoppable.

There has been pushback against globalisation over the years. The violent protests seen in Seattle during the World Trade Organisation meeting in December 1999 were the first sign that not everyone saw the move towards untrammelled freedom in a positive light. One conclusion from the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001 was that it was not only trade and financial markets that had gone global. The collapse of the investment bank Lehmann Brothers seven years later paid to the idea that the best thing governments could do when confronted with the power of global capital was to get out of the way and let the banks supervise themselves.

Now we have Britain’s rejection of the EU. This was more than a protest against the career opportunities that never knock and the affordable homes that never get built. It was a protest against the economic model that has been in place for the past three decades.

Extraordinary times are leading to extraordinary challenges. Linda Yueh, Fellow in Economics, Oxford University addresses these geopolitical challenges and demographic changes and how it will affect global economics and the asset management industry.

Modern humans have created many thousands of distinct cultures. So what will it mean if globalisation turns us into one giant, homogenous world culture?

The importance of the tribe in our evolutionary history has meant that natural selection has favoured in us a suite of psychological dispositions for making our cultures work and for defending them against competitors. These traits include cooperation, seeking affiliations, a predilection to coordinating our activities, and tendencies to trade and exchange goods and services. Thus, we have taken cooperation and sociality beyond the good relations among family members that dominate the rest of the animal kingdom, to making cooperation work among wider groups of people.

And so in a surprising turn, the very psychology that allows us to form and cooperate in small tribal groups, makes it possible for us to form into the larger social groupings of the modern world. Thus, early in our history most of us lived in small bands of maybe 50 to 200 people. At some point tribes formed that were essentially coalitions or bands of bands. Collections of tribes later formed into chiefdoms in which for the first time in our history a single ruler emerged.

But two factors looming on the horizon are likely to slow the rate at which cultural unification will happen.

One is resources, the other is demography. Cooperation has worked throughout history because large collections of people have been able to use resources more effectively and provide greater prosperity and protection than smaller groups. But that could change as resources become scarce.

This must be one of the most pressing social questions we can ask because if people begin to think they have reached what we might call ‘peak standard of living’ then they will naturally become more self-interested as the returns from cooperation begin to leak away. After all, why cooperate when there are no spoils to divide?

If we try to draw some conclusions from the ‘why’ we can see high levels of global employment and any form of prosperity will elude us and big reductions of poverty in the emerging world will not happen quickly enough.

Obviously, it is important to base these conclusions on where people are located and their individual views about the economies in which they live: how they see the problem, how they see their future, and whether the ambitions of different countries’ citizens can be advanced by stronger, more coordinated action around the world.

If you were to ask Americans what America has to do now to sort out its economy, some would say ‘cut deficits’; many would say ‘cut taxes’; but most would say ‘cut the foreign imports that are stealing our jobs’.

If you were to ask Europeans what their answer is, they would probably say ‘cut the debt’; and some might even complain about the very viability of the Euro and Brexit.

If you asked the Chinese what their solution was for their best future, they would probably answer that they are a developing country so other countries should stop threatening them with protectionism and complaining about their currency.

If you asked the developing world, they would call for an end to unfair trading practices that ruin their basic ability to export and say that aid is unfairly being cut or withheld.

If I asked the question a different way, asking the citizens ‘what do you really want to achieve as a country? I am sure that the answer would be very different.

In America people would say the main issue for them is jobs and rising living standards for the working middle class.

In the countries of the European Union people would say that Europe needs to get its young people into work and cut its high levels of unemployment.

In China people would say they want to see more personal prosperity and that means cutting the numbers of poor people and giving the rising middle class the opportunity to buy homes and access opportunities.

In many developing countries, people would tell you the problem was poverty.

Yet in the absence of a bigger vision of what can be achieved, the politics of each country inevitably pulls towards the narrow tasks and not the broad objectives.

So how can this wider debate contribute to global growth and collaboration?

Bradford DeLong once wrote: ‘History teaches us that when none of the three clear and present dangers that justify retrenchment and austerity – interest rate crowding-out, rising inflationary pressures on consumer prices, national overleverage via borrowing in foreign currencies – are present, you should not retrench’.

Yet in the absence of seeing a different and global route to greater prosperity, each country is trying, post-crisis, to return to its old ways. However, the security people crave will come not from countries clinging to an old world, but from reinventing themselves for our new interdependent world: Asia reducing poverty and building their new middle class; America and Europe exporting high-value-added goods by building a more skilled middle class; all undertaking structural reforms but in a growing economy.

This is the answer to those who travel today not with optimism but in fear. But there is no old world to return to: it has gone. The transition between epochs is always the moment of maximum danger. It is also the moment of maximum opportunity.

Final thought: against this backdrop the seemingly unstoppable and ever accelerating cultural homogenization around the world brought about by travel, the internet and social networking, although often decried, is probably a good thing even if it means the loss of cultural diversity: it increases our sense of togetherness via the sense of a shared culture. In fact, breaking down of cultural barriers – unfashionable as this can sound – is probably one of the few things that societies can do to increase harmony among ever more heterogeneous peoples.

So, to my mind, there is little doubt that the next century is going to be a time of great uncertainty and upheaval as resources, money and space become ever more scarce. It is going to be a bumpy road with many setbacks and conflicts. But if there was ever a species that could tackle these challenges it is our own.

It might be surprising, but our genes, in the form of our capacity for culture, have created in us a machine capable of greater cooperation, inventiveness and common good than any other on Earth.

And, of course it means you can always find a cappuccino just the way you like it no matter where we wake up.

As Herbie Hancock once said:

“Globalization means we have to re-examine some of our ideas, and look at ideas from other countries, from other cultures, and open ourselves to them. And that’s not comfortable for the average person.”

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Purpose Must Have Relevance – Author Interview

Geoff Hudson-Searle is interviewed by RTL Europe Television across his professional career and authorisms. Each of us is, to some extent or other, are a reflection of the real-life experiences of our lives. However, whether and how we succeed is determined at least in part by how we cope with those experiences and what we learn from them. Meaningful leadership , whether this be in business, life or family will conquer, the most profound truth of your individual journey’s. Courage, drive, determination, resilience, imagination, energy, you will find success. We are all human, not machines, we should not deny ourselves fulfilment or Meaningful Conversations.

FREEDOM AFTER THE SHARKS
In his first book, “Freedom after the sharks”, Geoff Hudson-Searle tells the story of a man who, despite a difficult family life and professional setbacks, developed the determination, drive and skills to create a successful business and happy life.
“Freedom after the sharks” shows how, even in a declining economy, a business can survive and even succeed. It covers some real-life experiences and offers some suggestions for dealing with problems and issues. It provides a guide to finding your way in the business world.

The book is suitable for entrepreneurs who might not be sure of the path to take or who want to benefit from other people’s mistakes and failures. Other audiences include middle management or junior executives who are looking for a fascinating life story of courage, drive and inspiration, as well as graduates and college students, who will find information that will help prepare them for their careers.

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MEANINGFUL CONVERSATIONS
This book has been written about some very passionate subjects in business today: Communications, Strategy and Business Development and Growth.

In February 2014 I set out as an author to write a weekly blog across a variety of subjects and foremost about people in business, opinions, research and tips, advise on some revelations, past and present.

This book demonstrates the relationship between communications (human 2 human), strategy and business development and growth. It is important to understand that a number of the ideas, developments and techniques employed at the beginning as well as the top of business can be successfully made flexible to apply.

Communications, Strategy and Business Development and Growth are essential for success and profitability in the business process.

This book provides a holistic overview of the essential leading methods of techniques. It will provide you with a hands on guide for business professionals and those in higher education.

Readers will gain insights into topical subjects, components of Communications, Strategy and Business Development and Growth, including a wide range of tips, models and techniques that will help to build strong and effective solutions in today’s business world.

The terms ‘Communications’, Strategy’ and Business Development and Growth’ have become overused during the last decade and have become devalued as a result. In this book I aim to simplify these terms and to re-value management and leadership by addressing topics and subjects in each distinctive chapter.

As Anthony Robbins once said:

“The way we communicate with others and with ourselves ultimately determines the quality of our lives.”

The book therefore covers all the essential components of Communications, Strategy and Business Development and Growth, but ensures that they are described in an engaging, enjoyable way with clarity.

The book is divided into three key areas to make it easy to find the material you need. Each component is easy to locate by the titles of the short story at the top of the pages. Each chapter within the three components relates strongly to each other but is also interrelated to all the other chapters. Those with interest on certain topics may wish to start at their area of interest first, while those who prefer to read the book from the first page to the end will proceed as they started, there really is a topic for everyone in the book.

Business professionals and individuals in the great challenges of today’s business world have renewed responsibility for what business does best; innovate, invest and grow. Many people wait until circumstances force change and transformation, that can be radical and painful, this book will arm you with the tips, advise and techniques to provide fresh thinking to your everyday environment and to innovate your circumstances for a better environment, we are all extraordinary people and have the ability to share and provide wealth creation and richness to our surroundings, the question is how much do we want to be extraordinary.

This book has been written not just for people in a company or organisation, it is about helping and supporting understanding across a wide variety of subjects to anyone in life; students, budding entrepreneurs, business people and aspiring individuals.

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JOURNEYS TO SUCCESS VOLUME 9
In the best-selling “Journeys to Success” series, men and women share their personal stories of transforming life-shattering events into triumphant success. The stories inside this book contain powerful seeds for resilience, spiritual awakening and plain determination in the face of powerful events. ‘Volume 9’ (2018) is a dedication to the late Tom Cunnigham, who recently passed away.

If you love stories of overcoming life’s challenges, this book is for you!

The “Journeys to Success”-series has become an international sensation, international author and I’m incredibly proud to have contributed this chapter: ‘Striving for an Ultimate Goal’.

The series has sold over 100 million copies in various formats including ebooks, hardback, and paperback, apps and audiobooks.

Written from the work, experience and wisdom of Geoff Hudson-Searle – an international director and business thought leader – ‘Journeys to Success Volume 9’ is rapidly poised to become the next bestselling “must have” for busy executives, business professionals and those in higher education. Simplifying and comprehensively deconstructing the over-used terms used in life, business and ‘growth’, Hudson-Searle’s compelling volume provides refreshing new advice on thriving in today’s cutthroat and often confusing business world. One critic recently wrote, “Well done Geoff, I’m a buyer #BigTime congratulations for your further literary success, more power to you.

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Do we need AI, if humans can grow in development?

It seems like every day there is a new article or story about artificial intelligence (AI). AI is going to take over all of the jobs. AI is going to do all of the repetitive, menial tasks carried out by admins on a daily basis. AI is going to rise up and take over. AI is not going to take over but instead be natively baked into all systems to produce more human interactions.

For all the things AI is allegedly going to do, it can already do a lot right now, such as automation, custom searches, security interventions, analysis and prediction on data, serve as a digital assistant, perform algorithm-based machine learning and more.

It will be a good number of years before we get AI doing everything for us, the real question is can humans survive without AI?

Does anyone recall the Trachtenberg speed system of basic mathematics?

The Trachtenberg Speed System of Basic Mathematics is a system of mental mathematics which in part did not require the use of multiplication tables to be able to multiply. The method was created over seventy years ago. The main idea behind the Trachtenberg Speed System of Basic Mathematics is that there must be an easier way to do multiplication, division, squaring numbers and finding square roots, especially if you want to do it mentally.

Jakow Trachtenberg spent years in a Nazi concentration camp and to escape the horrors he found refuge in his mind developing these methods. Some of the methods are not new and have been used for thousands of years. This is why there is some similarity between the Trachtenberg System and Vedic math for instance. However, Jackow felt that even these methods could be simplified further. Unlike Vedic math and other systems like Bill Handley’s excellent Speed Math where the method you choose to calculate the answer depends on the numbers you are using, the Trachtenberg System scales up from single digit multiplication to multiplying with massive numbers with no change in the method.

Multiplication is done without multiplication tables “Can you multiply 5132437201 times 4522736502785 in seventy seconds? One young boy (grammar school-no calculator) did successfully by using the Trachtenberg Speed System of Basic Mathematics.

So, with human intelligence why do we need AI, AGI, deep learning or machine learning?

Faster than a calculator, Arthur Benjamin discusses the speed of mathematics TEDxOxford

Albert Einstein is widely regarded as a genius, but how did he get that way? Many researchers have assumed that it took a very special brain to come up with the theory of relativity and other stunning insights that form the foundation of modern physics. A study of 14 newly discovered photographs of Einstein’s brain, which was preserved for study after his death, concludes that the brain was indeed highly unusual in many ways. But researchers still don’t know exactly how the brain’s extra folds and convolutions translated into Einstein’s amazing abilities.

Experts say Einstein programmed his own brain, that he had a special brain when the field of physics was ripe for new insights, that he had the right brain in the right place at the right time.

Can we all program our brains for advancement, does our civilisation really need our brains rely on AI/AGI?

Artificial intelligence is incredibly advanced, at least, at certain tasks. AI has defeated world champions in chess, Go, and now poker. But can artificial intelligence actually think?

The answer is complicated, largely because intelligence is complicated. One can be book-smart, street-smart, emotionally gifted, wise, rational, or experienced; it’s rare and difficult to be intelligent in all of these ways. Intelligence has many sources and our brains don’t respond to them all the same way. Thus, the quest to develop artificial intelligence begets numerous challenges, not the least of which is what we don’t understand about human intelligence.

Still, the human brain is our best lead when it comes to creating AI. Human brains consist of billions of connected neurons that transmit information to one another and areas designated to functions such as memory, language, and thought. The human brain is dynamic, and just as we build muscle, we can enhance our cognitive abilities we can learn. So can AI, thanks to the development of artificial neural networks (ANN), a type of machine learning algorithm in which nodes simulate neurons that compute and distribute information. AI such as AlphaGo, the program that beat the world champion at Go last year, uses ANNs not only to compute statistical probabilities and outcomes of various moves, but to adjust strategy based on what the other player does.

Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, and Google all employ deep learning, which expands on traditional ANNs by adding layers to the information input/output. More layers allow for more representations of and links between data. This resembles human thinking when we process input, we do so in something akin to layers. For example, when we watch a football game on television, we take in the basic information about what’s happening in a given moment, but we also take in a lot more: who’s on the field (and who’s not), what plays are being run and why, individual match-ups, how the game fits into existing data or history (does one team frequently beat the other? Is the centre forward passing the ball or scoring?), how the refs are calling the game, and other details. In processing this information we employ memory, pattern recognition, statistical and strategic analysis, comparison, prediction, and other cognitive capabilities. Deep learning attempts to capture those layers.

You’re probably already familiar with deep learning algorithms. Have you ever wondered how Facebook knows to place on your page an ad for rain boots after you got caught in a downpour? Or how it manages to recommend a page immediately after you’ve liked a related page? Facebook’s DeepText algorithm can process thousands of posts, in dozens of different languages, each second. It can also distinguish between Purple Rain and the reason you need galoshes.

Deep learning can be used with faces, identifying family members who attended an anniversary or employees who thought they attended that rave on the down-low. These algorithms can also recognise objects in context such a program that could identify the alphabet blocks on the living room floor, as well as the pile of kids’ books and the bouncy seat. Think about the conclusions that could be drawn from that snapshot, and then used for targeted advertising, among other things.
Google uses Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to facilitate image recognition and language translation. This enables Google Translate to go beyond a typical one-to-one conversion by allowing the program to make connections between languages it wasn’t specifically programmed to understand. Even if Google Translate isn’t specifically coded for translating Icelandic into Vietnamese, it can do so by finding commonalities in the two tongues and then developing its own language which functions as an interlingua, enabling the translation.

Machine thinking has been tied to language ever since Alan Turing’s seminal 1950 publication “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” This paper described the Turing Test—a measure of whether a machine can think. In the Turing Test, a human engages in a text-based chat with an entity it can’t see. If that entity is a computer program and it can make the human believe he’s talking to another human, it has passed the test.

But what about IBM’s Watson, which thrashed the top two human contestants in Jeopardy?

Watson’s dominance relies on access to massive and instantly accessible amounts of information, as well as its computation of answers’ probable correctness.

Why humans will always be smarter than AI…..

This concept of context is one that is central to Hofstadter’s lifetime of work to figure out AI. In a seminal 1995 essay he examines an earlier treatise on pattern recognition by Russian researcher Mikhail Bongard, a Russian researcher, and comes to the conclusion that perception goes beyond simply matching known patterns:

… in strong contrast to the usual tacit assumption that the quintessence of visual perception is the activity of dividing a complex scene into its separate constituent objects followed by the activity of attaching standard labels to the now-separated objects (ie, the identification of the component objects as members of various pre-established categories, such as ‘car’, ‘dog’, ‘house’, ‘hammer’, ‘airplane’, etc)

… perception is far more than the recognition of members of already-established categories — it involves the spontaneous manufacture of new categories at arbitrary levels of abstraction.
For Booking.com, those new categories could be defined in advance, but a more general-purpose AI would have to be capable of defining its own categories. That’s a goal Hofstadter has spent six decades working towards, and is still not even close.

In her BuzzFeed article, Katie Notopoulos goes on to explain that this is not the first time that Facebook’s recallbration of the algorithms driving its newsfeeds has resulted in anomalous behavior. Today, it’s commenting on posts that leads to content being overpromoted. Back in the summer of 2016 it was people posting simple text posts. What’s interesting is that the solution was not a new tweak to the algorithm. It was Facebook users who adjusted — people learned to post text posts and that made them less rare.

And that’s always going to be the case. People will always be faster to adjust than computers, because that’s what humans are optimized to do. Maybe sometime many years in the future, computers will catch up with humanity’s ability to define new categories — but in the meantime, humans will have learned how to harness computing to augment their own native capabilities. That’s why we will always stay smarter than AI.

Final thought, perhaps the major limitation of AI can be captured by a single letter: G. While we have AI, we don’t have AGI—artificial general intelligence (sometimes referred to as “strong” or “full” AI). The difference is that AI can excel at a single task or game, but it can’t extrapolate strategies or techniques and apply them to other scenarios or domains you could probably beat AlphaGo at Tic Tac Toe. This limitation parallels human skills of critical thinking or synthesis—we can apply knowledge about a specific historical movement to a new fashion trend or use effective marketing techniques in a conversation with a boss about a raise because we can see the overlaps. AI has restrictions, for now.

Some believe we’ll never truly have AGI; others believe it’s simply a matter of time (and money). Last year, Kimera unveiled Nigel, a program it bills as the first AGI. Since the beta hasn’t been released to the public, it’s impossible to assess those claims, but we’ll be watching closely. In the meantime, AI will keep learning just as we do: by watching YouTube videos and by reading books. Whether that’s comforting or frightening is another question.

Stephen Hawking on AI replacing humans:

‘The genie is out of the bottle. We need to move forward on artificial intelligence development but we also need to be mindful of its very real dangers. I fear that AI may replace humans altogether. If people design computer viruses, someone will design AI that replicates itself. This will be a new form of life that will outperform humans.’

From an interview with Wired, November 2017

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Disruptive change is inevitable – Change is constant

Change is inevitable.

More and more organisations today face a dynamic and changing environment. The oft-heard rallying cry in today’s organisations is “Change or die.” Survival in today’s global economy requires organisations to be flexible and adapt readily to the ever-changing marketplace. Change has become the norm. It is as necessary for organisations to pay as much attention to the psychological and social aspects of change as they do to the technological aspects.

We live in an era of risk and instability. Globalisation, new technologies, and greater transparency have combined to upend the business environment and give many CEOs a deep sense of unease. Just look at the numbers. Since 1980 the volatility of business operating margins, largely static since the 1950s, has more than doubled, as has the size of the gap between winners (companies with high operating margins) and losers (those with low ones).

Change is the one true constant in business, especially when it comes to operating a business. Having defined processes in place to effectively manage change can help companies sustain success.

In today’s business environment, knowing how to successfully navigate these changes and develop appropriate and effective processes to properly manage such change is a must. It’s virtually impossible for organisations to make sound strategic decisions and completely accomplish objectives when deprived of strong change management strategies. This is especially true in the world of project, program and portfolio management, where obstacles and ambiguity are inevitable at every juncture.

Companies all over the world find that they have to continually make changes to the way they work in order to stay ahead of the game, be profitable, and be relevant. Oftentimes, the changes could be externally mandated, internally conceived, or both, but the reality is that companies do have to evolve, change, or die. The global landscape is changing: businesses are moving to take advantage of new markets; organisations are restructuring to operate better, given the current market dynamic; competition is causing companies to radically change the way they do business.

The old business is not coming back – this is not just a statistic, it is a fact.

Companies operate in an increasingly complex world: Business environments are more diverse, dynamic, and interconnected than ever – and far less predictable. A study I read recently suggests that 75% of the S&P 500 will turn over in the next 15 years.

Many businesses that “have done things the same way for years” are affected by disruptive change: the economy changes, the competition changes, products change, technology changes, customers change, employees change, vendors change, buying methods change, delivery methods change.

Disruptive change is coming, and the only question is whether companies are going to cause it or fall victim to it. Disruption is not easy, to create or to confront it.

Businesses need to grow continuously in one way or another to achieve and maintain success. Growth comes by making positive changes that promote growth and by responding correctly to external changes.

Organisations throughout the world and across the global markets also recognise the need to embrace ‘nimbleness’ and ‘agility’ if they are to survive in the long run. The ever-changing landscape, globalisation, global dynamics, make it inevitable that companies have to evolve fast, repeatedly, and in a continuously improving manner in order to comply with regulations, collaborate with customers, and stay ahead of competition.

Whilst awareness of the challenges associated with change is prevalent, there is also compelling evidence of the long-term benefit of being great at driving organisational change. Therefore, it is expedient to look at some of the reasons why change is difficult, so that we can deliberately tackle the reasons for change complexity.

Sustaining success depends on an organisation’s ability to adapt

Why can some companies take advantage of any change the market brings, while others struggle with market-necessitated modification? The reasons why will differ for each organisation, but the question is definitely worth asking especially in light of the fact that the pace of change is accelerating at the fastest rate in recorded history.

Most companies find it hard to transform themselves in difficult circumstances. Corporate transformation under pressure.

Leadership needs to have a mindset that although change ability (agility, resilience) is essential for the survival and growth of many companies, there needs to be a concerted effort to build capacity to lead change effectively, and to purposefully build a change friendly culture in a systemic manner. This means that change leadership or sponsorship becomes a leadership competency that is recruited for and developed in leaders in the same way that it is done for other competencies such as decision-making.
Companies most likely to be successful in making change work to their advantage are the ones that no longer view change as a discrete event to be managed, but as a constant opportunity to evolve the business.

Change readiness is the new change management: change readiness is the ability to continuously initiate and respond to change in ways that create advantage, minimise risk, and sustain performance.

Organisations, and the people within them, must constantly re-invent themselves to remain competitive. Sustaining success depends on an organization’s ability to adapt to a changing environment.

Senior executives recognise that in order to compete optimally in the current and future landscapes, their companies will be expected to do more for less in a more dynamic landscape with issues of globalisation, new market opportunities, and new ways of doing business. There is a recognition that the changes are going to increase and the demands for business benefits realisation will also increase. It is therefore no longer optional for leaders to increase their ability to successfully implement strategies by increasing their ability to manage change and in fact leveraging this change management skill to become a competitive advantage.

If you’re struggling or your market is down, change management is especially critical because growing companies are not afforded the time to weather the storm of down markets or decreased demand. Offensive change when the company is doing well is a whole lot easier to manage than defensive change.
With this sentiment, I am not suggesting that you overhaul your business entirely change your mission, vision, and values or abandon your product strategy with every minor bump in the road. I am suggesting, however, that the best companies the ones that experience exceptional long-term success are able to quickly recognise the need to change and make the tweaks necessary to help their business continue its growth trajectory.

Here are three tips that can help the journey of change easier:

  • Top down support from the CEO level down to the senior executives below the CEO is what ultimately drives successful change. When the changes are major, you need to create a burning platform scenario that will encourage a sense of urgency.
  • Clear, consistent, and transparent communication by all executives is critical to explain why the change is necessary. Throughout the change process, it’s important to regularly and clearly communicate the reasons for change and reinforce that message to your team so they understand why you’re taking the hill in front of you.
  • Quickly identify the senior team members who don’t buy in and encourage and support them to leave the company if they refuse to embrace change. This means you may lose some very good people who helped you get to where you are, but those people won’t be as valuable going forward if they aren’t willing to help you get to where you need to be.

Final thought on the subject – business is a little like the growth rings on a tree. Every year, something changes it could be your product, your top competitors, your customers’ preferences, or any number of things. The best companies adapt to those changes, reinvent themselves when change requires it, and find a way to grow – in good times and bad.

Successful organisations foster a positive attitude toward change by anticipating it and purposefully planning for change. Change must be addressed in an intentional, goal-oriented manner. Change is something that people should do, not something that is done to them. People are more comfortable with change when they participate in planning for or implementing it because they gain some sense of control which reduces their fears.

As George Soros once said:

‘Market fundamentalists recognize that the role of the state in the economy is always disruptive, inefficient, and generally has negative connotations. This leads them to believe that the market mechanism can take care of all the problems.’

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Why Leadership Matters

As all leaders experience the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, you will know you have been tested in ways that you never expected. And yet, somehow, we all prevail. Despite the frustrations, anger and fear, you will have learned a lot about yourself. You will be be forced to recognise your own weaknesses and eccentricities, and discover reserves of strength that you had not known existed. In the process, you will become less judgmental and more accepting of yourself and of others.

Leadership forces you to stay true to yourself and to recognise when you are at your best and when you are at your worst; the important thing is to stay focused and keep moving forward. You will learn that overcoming adversity is what brings the most satisfaction, and that achievements are made more meaningful by the struggle it took to achieve them.
Leadership will conquer, the most profound truth of your individual journey’s. Courage, drive, determination, resilience, imagination, energy and the right team, you will find success.
Winston Churchill once said:

“This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

A single brain sometimes cannot take decisions alone. One needs the assistance and guidance of others as well to accomplish the tasks within the desired time frame. In a team, every member contributes to his level best to achieve the assigned targets. The team members must be compatible with each other to avoid unnecessary conflicts and misunderstandings.

Every team should have a team leader who can hold their team together and extract the best out of the team members. The team leader should be such that every individual draw inspiration from them and seek their advice and guidance whenever required. A leader should be a role model for his team members and a great mentor.

I had the pleasure of meeting Brendan Hall for lunch recently – he led the Spirit of Australia crew to overall victory in the Clipper 2009-10 Race, when aged 28. It was the second of three times the trophy has gone to an Australian team.

Recruiter 360 TV – Brendan Hall, Author of “Team Spirit” and winning Clipper round the world captain

Following the win, Brendan wrote the book “Team Spirit”, based on his race insights into the teamwork, leadership, skill, courage and focus required for performance.

Talking to Brendan he discussed how his team had just faced the ultimate challenge and one that they could never have been prepared for but circumstances dictated that they sail across the world’s largest ocean at a particularly fearsome time of year, on their own.

‘They had pulled together in the true sense of teamwork, and kept each other safe.’ ‘I feel it was their greatest achievement, and it was mine by association as I had got them to the point where they could take on that challenge. Ultimately that experience and those qualities led to our overall result.’

His crew were the same raw materials that every other boat had. They had characters and influential people and its leaders, together they made a great leadership team. The approach Brendan took was to empower everybody throughout the race and the goal was to get to a point where Brendan was redundant on deck and he could concentrate on everything else, the weather routing and the navigation.

A true team leader plays an important role in guiding the team members and motivating them to stay focused. One who sets a goal and objective for the team. Every team is formed for a purpose.
The leader alone should not set the goal, suggestions should be invited from one and all and issues must be discussed on an open forum. He must make his team members well aware of their roles and responsibilities. He must understand his team members well. The duties and responsibilities must be assigned as per their interest and specialization for them to accept the challenge willingly.

Never impose things on them.
Encourage the team members to help each other. Create a positive ambience at the workplace. Avoid playing politics or provoking individuals to fight. Make sure that the team members do not fight among themselves. In case of a conflict, don’t add fuel to the fire, rather try to resolve the fight immediately. Listen to both the parties before coming to any conclusion. Try to come to an alternative feasible for all.

The following 5 reasons summarise the importance of teamwork and why it matters:

Teamwork motivates unity in the workplace
A teamwork environment promotes an atmosphere that fosters friendship and loyalty. These close-knit relationships motivate employees in parallel and align them to work harder, cooperate and be supportive of one another.

Individuals possess diverse talents, weaknesses, communication skills, strengths, and habits. Therefore, when a teamwork environment is not encouraged this can pose many challenges towards achieving the overall goals and objectives. This creates an environment where employees become focused on promoting their own achievements and competing against their fellow colleagues. Ultimately, this can lead to an unhealthy and inefficient working environment.
When teamwork is working the whole team would be motivated and working toward the same goal in harmony.

Teamwork offers differing perspectives and feedback
Good teamwork structures provide your organization with a diversity of thought, creativity, perspectives, opportunities, and problem-solving approaches. A proper team environment allows individuals to brainstorm collectively, which in turn increases their success to problem solve and arrive at solutions more efficiently and effectively.

Effective teams also allow the initiative to innovate, in turn creating a competitive edge to accomplish goals and objectives. Sharing differing opinions and experiences strengthens accountability and can help make effective decisions faster, than when done alone.

Team effort increases output by having quick feedback and multiple sets of skills come into play to support your work. You can do the stages of designing, planning, and implementation much more efficiently when a team is functioning well.

Teamwork provides improved efficiency and productivity
When incorporating teamwork strategies, you become more efficient and productive. This is because it allows the workload to be shared, reducing the pressure on individuals, and ensure tasks are completed within a set time frame. It also allows goals to be more attainable, enhances the optimization of performance, improves job satisfaction and increases work pace.

Ultimately, when a group of individuals works together, compared to one person working alone, they promote a more efficient work output and are able to complete tasks faster due to many minds intertwined on the same goals and objectives of the business.

Teamwork provides great learning opportunities
Working in a team enables us to learn from one another’s mistakes. You are able to avoid future errors, gain insight from differing perspectives, and learn new concepts from more experienced colleagues.

In addition, individuals can expand their skill sets, discover fresh ideas from newer colleagues and therefore ascertain more effective approaches and solutions towards the tasks at hand. This active engagement generates the future articulation, encouragement and innovative capacity to problem solve and generate ideas more effectively and efficiently.

Teamwork promotes workplace synergy
Mutual support shared goals, cooperation and encouragement provide workplace synergy. With this, team members are able to feel a greater sense of accomplishment, are collectively responsible for outcomes achieved and feed individuals with the incentive to perform at higher levels.

When team members are aware of their own responsibilities and roles, as well as the significance of their output being relied upon by the rest of their team, team members will be driven to share the same vision, values, and goals. The result creates a workplace environment based on fellowship, trust, support, respect, and cooperation.

Final thoughts
Leadership is a necessary element to promoting teamwork in an organisation. When leaders are great, there is a lot of positive teamwork and many benefits. However, when leaders are poor there can be negative consequences that are completely opposite to the benefits of teamwork.

In business, leaders have the responsibility to do what they reasonably can to promote a good team environment. Practicing team-oriented leadership strategies can do a lot to usher in a sense of teamwork among professional team members. It is up to the leaders to make sure teams are functioning to their highest capacity. Although it sounds like a large responsibility, the benefits of promoting teamwork are incredible!

Henry Ford once said:

“Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success. Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right. Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.”

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Sri Lanka and its gems of beauty!

“I want you to understand that the island of Ceylon is for its size the finest island in the world, and from its streams comes Rubies, Sapphires, Topazes, and Amethyst and Garnet.”

Marco Polo – 1292 AD

I recently had a business trip to S.E Asia and the fortune to visit the beautiful island of Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka is officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, an island country in South Asia, located in the Indian Ocean to the southwest of the Bay of Bengal and to the southeast of the Arabian Sea. The island is historically and culturally intertwined with the Indian subcontinent, but is geographically separated from the Indian subcontinent by the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait. The legislative capital, Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte, is a suburb of the commercial capital and largest city, Colombo.

Sri Lanka’s documented history spans 3,000 years, with evidence of pre-historic human settlements dating back to at least 125,000 years. It has a rich cultural heritage and the first known Buddhist writings of Sri Lanka, the Pāli Canon, date back to the Fourth Buddhist council in 29 BC.

Endless sunrises, sunsets, beaches, timeless ruins, welcoming people, oodles of elephants, rolling surf, cheap prices, fun trains, famous tea and flavourful food make Sri Lanka irresistible.

But these are only some of the characteristics, as I was fortunate to find out when I met Rauf Abdul and Ishan Rox from The Jewel Court in Bentota.

With a huge smile and a welcome warmth Rauf greeted me with ‘Ayubowan Geoff’, I was inquisitive to learn more about what Rauf and Ishan had to tell me about the beautiful island of Sri Lanka and one of the largest precious stone collections in the world.

So, Rauf and Ishan, what can you tell me about Sri Lanka and the precious stones that has made this beautiful island a world leader in gemstones?

‘Bohoma Istuti Geoff’ (Thank you very much Geoff), historically from the Ancient times Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) has gained a very good popularity and good name for the world famous and rare and precious and semi-precious naturally formed supernatural gems. The great chronicle of Ceylon Mahavamsa too mentioned about the valuable gem and jewelleries of Ceylon. Of course, from the time immemorial a separate group of people especially skilled craftsmen have had well trained in the creation of enchanting mater pieces and beautifully hand-made gem studded jewelleries and ornaments specially for Queens and Kings of the Sinhala and of the different kingdoms of Lanka.

King Solomon was also reported to have had brought valuable gems from the island of gems at that time (Ceylon) (Ratna-Deepa) literally means island of gems to win the heart of the beautiful queens. Ratnapura located at 103km from the metropolis capital city of Columbo is the famous traditional gem mining town of Ceylon. Ratnapura is also literally means the city of gems. Sri Lanka has the greatest concentration of gems on the Earth and Sri Lanka has been ranked among rh five gem bearing nations. One can find different varieties of precious and semi-precious and some of the rarest and expensive gems in Ratnapura, are found in abundance in blessed city. Gem mining is also one of the natural resources.

Ratnapura is very popular and famous for gems and specially well known for magnificent sapphires of different colours natural corundum’s in white, yellow, pink, orange, purple, alexandrite and padmaraga, king of the gemstones star-sapphire and star ruby are actually different colours of the same mineral (corundum). But while rubies are always red, sapphires come in varieties of colours. Sapphire is a cold gem with the same hardness and specified gravity as those rubies. The best blue-sapphire does not change its colour when held upfront of an electric light.

Diamond is the hardest and most dazzling jewel in the world. The hardness of diamond is (10 density) and the hardness of sapphires and rubies are (09 density). The blue sapphire stone has the power to enhance the status of an individual who is in possession of a blue sapphire gem. There is a common belief that the sapphires are beneficiaries to kings, queens, princes, princesses, administrators’, political leaders and the hearts of the government for the protection and safety. Unlike other stones, sapphires prized for their clarity, carat weight and masterfully cut shaped, lustre and beauty. As for carats the natural royal blue colour magnificent blue sapphire can easily cost more than twice as much as one carat.

Blue sapphire is the stone of the kings, queens, princes, princesses, head of the government, intellectuals, dignitaries-business magnates, wealthy and respectable people. Blue sapphires make the way for luxurious joyful royal life and happiness. Blue sapphire is a valuable gem net to the hardest gem in the world you can cut glass with a point of diamond but of course you can scratch glass with a point of blue sapphire gem. Blue sapphires are naturally formed super natural gem always seen in the island of gems. It is obvious among the different colours of sapphire available in the gem trade. Indeed, royal blue, corn-flower blue, medium blue, lighter blue is generally the best colour and has been accepted and recommended by the international gem and jewellery trade.

Historically many coloured gemstones are born natural, means the stones are genuine and natural have been enhanced to improve their appearance. Thermal enhancement of rubies and sapphires is considered stable and permanent under the normal wear and handling conditions and it is generally accepted and recommended by the international gem and jewellery trade.

White Sapphire
White sapphire resembles same as the diamond, the most dazzling jewel in the world. White sapphire has the lustre, beauty and the same hardness as the different colours of sapphires. Any person can imitate and pretend a white sapphire is a diamond. White sapphire is also a valuable gem with sheen and lustre like a diamond.

Star Sapphire
Star sapphire is a miraculous and wonderful stone. It is a blessed stone to Sri Lanka, because it is the wonder of asia found only in Sri Lanka. It is a natural formation available in the popular and famous traditional gem mining town of Sri Lanka precious and semiprecious stones and different colour gems can be seen in and around the city. Star sapphire is a re gem and an amazing jewel because no one is capable of inserting the star into the stone. It is a natural formation naturally formed supernatural gem star sapphire is the stone of destiny in which three crossed lines intersect in the centre of the stone symbolising faith, destiny and hope. Star sapphire brings one’s good fortune, fame, wealth, longevity and popularity. It is a very rare gem. Star sapphires always comes in blue and slightly blackish blue in colour.

Blue Sapphire
An expensive and gorgeous gold ring set with a huge natural blue sapphire gem (natural corundum) colour royal blue, double cluster set with VVS1 (VVS1 is actually immaculate) diamonds around, which was gifted to princess Diana at the Royal wedding function took place at Buckingham Palace by our former president. Britain’s Prince William married Kate Middleton in April, a ring set with the same stone previously worn by Princess Diana originated in Sri Lanka which was gifted to Princess Kate Middleton by Her Majesty.

The best-known fact that Sri Lanka was called as Ceylon in the ancient times Ceylon was very popular and famous for magnificent natural blue sapphires. Whenever an Englishman come to Ceylon (Now Sri Lanka) who never missed the opportunity of buying at least a piece of precious blue sapphire gem. It promises wealth, name of fame, joy, love and happiness to the wearer. It increases once’s good fortune, fame, health and wealth, longevity and popularity, peace, patience and tranquillity. It helps reach a high level and will always triumph. This is a well-known fact of a person who is in possession of a blue sapphire gem ensures a very long energetic life with dignity and inspires love and faithfulness and harmonious. There is a common belief that the precious gems have magnetic powers in varying degrees and have the curative and healing power to cure many illnesses unlike other gems, blue sapphires are prized for their clarity, weight, cut and lustre is more valuable.

Yellow Sapphire
Yellow Sapphire is also one of the different colours of sapphires found in the world. Known very popular traditionally manual gem mining old town of Ratnapura. Ratnapura literally means City of Gems. Ratna is the gem and pura is the city. It is also a natural formation same as other different colours of sapphires. Yellow Sapphire is a very famous and familiar gem among the Indian people. It is obvious that, on the advice and the guidance of the Sage (Samy) most of the Indians used to adore a ring set with a yellow sapphire gem. Because the yellow sapphire gem has the magnetic power to increase good health, wealth, longevity and popularity. It brings good fortune, and protects and safeguards from evil effects and spirits.

Rauf Abdul & Ishan Rox
Rauf Abdul & Ishan Rox

Indian people of course call the yellow sapphire gem as Pushparagam. Literally mean ‘Passion of Flower’. It flowers life of the person who is in possession of a yellow sapphire. Indeed, he is a very lucky and fortunate human in the world. Try to be a proud owner of a ring set with a yellow-sapphire gem and feel the benefit and enjoy fortunes and experience the difference. Yellow Sapphire is an enchanting gem with beautiful lustre and attraction.

Ruby
Ruby is a gem of various shades of red corundum, generally some stones are hot pink, some are blackish red, and some are pale coloured. Of course, it is a hot stone and most valued among precious stones. Most of the rubies are translucent and suitable to wear due to the wide range of colour and hardness. Ruby is an enchanting gem.

A flawless ruby is smooth and having a attractive lustre, brilliance and radiance and a rich red-colour. Rubies are very costly because of the scarcity. A large ruby is rare and very expensive than a large diamond. The rarest and most expensive shade is described as being the colour of pigeons blood a rich velvety deep red, but without fire or sparkle. A few people only prefer the red ruby. It brings wealth and leads a prosperous and joyful life and popularity. The person who is in possession of a ruby is a blessed and always triumph in his life. It activates and vitalises the whole body through the circulation of blood. Ruby will make on with courage of determined, cheerful, active, ambitious and successfully blessed with sterling qualities. Ruby is generally an enchanting gem to win the heart.

Star Ruby
Star ruby is also a very rare gem rarely come to the hands of fortunate gem merchants. Of course, the Star Ruby is also a wonderful gem. It is also naturally formed, supernatural gem found in the famous and very popular traditional gem mining town of Ratnapura. It is also the wonder of Asia. As mentioned before, Star Ruby is the stone of destiny. Same as the Star Sapphire three crossed lines intersect in the centre of the stone. Symbolized the heart of spiritual love and devotion.

It is also a natural creation of nature. A blessed stone rarely available in Ratnapura and found only in Sri Lanka. The Star Ruby paves the way for achievement of goals and betterment in life. No one is capable of inserting a three crossed-line star into the stone. It is truly a naturally formed wonderful creation of nature.

Cat’s Eye
Cat’s Eye is a wonderful and rare gem. It is a blessed stone, naturally formed a super natural gem found only in the traditional gem mining town of Ratnapura. It is a hard gem belonging to semi-precious and transparent variety of quartz because of the rare gem much valued in the gem trade. It is a hot stone and appearance opalescent available in various shades, ranging from a cloudy yellow to brownish green colour. The pure variety has a yellowish radiance and white brilliant straight band. It is a miraculous and vary rare gem. Only a few people whoa re blessed to be the proud owner of the naturally formed supernatural and amazing gem in the world of a person who is in possession of a cat’s eye brings success and prosperity, longevity and happiness in the life. Cat’s eye is a very rare gem extremely unique gem remarkably resembles same as an eye of a cat is called cat’s eye.

Zircon
Zircon is also a rare variety of gem rarely found in the traditional gem mining town of Ratnapura. Means literally the city of gems. Yes of course it brings success and prosperity. It ensures good health, wealth, safeguards one from enemies and criticism. It is naturally colourless, reddish orange, brownish red, grey, violet-grey or green. A very good stone reflects a golden colour, when seen from a distance. It is transparent, soft to the touch, lustrous and ample radiance. Zircon is also a very rare gem.

Padmaraga
Padmaraga is the King of the precious and semi-precious gem. It is also a wonderful stone in the world, a blessed gem very rarely come across to the gem dealers’ hands. It is also found in the old traditional gem mining town of Ratnapura. Padmaraga is a very beautiful and enchanting gem-like florescence of blossomed flowers. It is also a very rare, expensive and unique gem.

Topaz
Topaz is also a naturally formed beautiful gem. Adequality available here in Sri Lanka in different colours. Topaz is transparent mineral gem being a silicate and fluoride of aluminium and generally found in rocks. It is a cold gem occurring naturally in a prismatic form and also found in yellow colour, pink and blue shades. The jewelleries settled with blue topaz are beautiful has an enchanting power to attract the teenagers. Of course, it is a very beautiful gem.

Aqua Marine
Aqua Marine means sea water. The finest beryl and is called so because of its bluish, sea green, bluish green tint and it is transparent. It is also a very rare gem found rarely come across to the hand of gem dealers. It is also a valuable gem found in Ratnapura.

Amethyst
Amethyst also a violet variety of quarts is used as a gem containing traces of manganese titanium and iron found in the gem mining area. It is a very beautiful stone and gives more appearance of sets in the enchanting design of jewelleries. Amethyst is an attractive gem also found in Sri Lanka.

Garnet
Garnet is a hard-vitreous silicate mineral occurring in a number of varieties. It is also a natural stone found in the popular traditional mining town in Sri Lanka. It is a very familiar gem common deep red colour and transparent. It belongs to the Capricornian garnets are available in different varieties namely rhodolite garnet, hessonite garnet, spessartile garnet and alamandine garnet. Most of the people knows about the garnet it is an internationally well-known gem.

Alexandrite
Alexandrite is a blessed gem. Very rarely found and seen in the traditional mineral mining town of Ratnapura. For popularly famous for rare and unique gems. Alexandrite is also a very rare and wonderful gem. Also naturally formed supernatural gem. Alexandrite was discovered on the day King Czar Alexander was born. It shines green in the natural day light and turns raspberry red in the artificial light. Of course, it is a very rare and very expensive gem found only in Sri Lanka.

Moonstone
Moonstone was the first stone discovered about one hundred and fifty years ago in an alluvial mine located in an old village called Meetiyagoda in the Southern Province (Galle District). The employees who engaged in the mining used their own traditional system with the support of the poles and planks to go down about twenty or twenty-five metres or sometimes further down. It was very dangerous because always the alluvial floor is liable to collapse at any moment. Nowadays we use advanced scaffolding system to go down further with the support of planks is safer.

Moonstone is always a translucent variety of feldspar with a pearly lustre. Once it is cut and polished having a glistening white, brilliant straight band inside, which rolls with the turn of the stone. Moonstone is a very famous and familiar gem among the Germans. The Germans believe that Moonstone has the magnetic power to give good health, wealth, longevity and specially popularity. Moonstone brings good fortune, protects and safeguards from dangerous diseases and evil effects. When a German visits to Sri Lanka, never misses an opportunity of buying a piece of moonstone available in the island of paradise and the pearl of the South East Asia.

Emerald
This is a gem of rich variety of beryl and the colour is due to the presence of chronium oxide. It is a hot gem and one of the expensive gemstones in the world. The lush intense green colour of the emerald is associated with wisdom, fertility and life. It is also instilling divine quality through the power and beauty of its ray. It is a symbol of regeneration and life flowers with creative and artistic abilities while energising and replenishing. It has the magnetic power for calming. Its rays always help in healing and balancing and providing with a tranquil and a serene state of mind. It increases one’s intelligence, farsighted vision. Commonly people will think of having an emerald gem will help to preserve the chastity and protect from evil spirits. Of course, it is a sure cure for stammering, ensures wealth, popularity and prosperity.

The world famous and very popular Cleopatra is most desirous and willingly adored gem was the emerald. She always adorned some of the enchanting jewelleries set with valuable emerald gems.
It is a well-known fact in the world. The gem emerald protects from evil effects, ill eye and specially from venomous snake bites. A flawless emerald is smooth and transparent and has a radiance brilliance. It is also a rare and unique gem in the world.

As old as civilization itself the Sri Lankan Gem Industry currently ranks with those of Myanmar, Brazil, South Africa and Thailand as one of the world’s most prominent gem-bearing nations. Swathed in the myth, legend, religion and the occult of Sri Lanka, gemstones, precious and semi-precious, have enriched the island’s economy, culture and reputation since about the year 543 BC.

Gemstone mining in Sri Lanka is mostly from secondary deposits. The gravels yield sapphires, rubies, cat’s eyes and other chrysoberyls, spinels, garnets, beryl, tourmalines, topazes, quartz and many other gemstones. In Sri Lanka, gem-bearing gravels known as illam are some of the richest in the world. Blessed with geological conditionsmade up of the ideal blend of chemistry, heat, pressure, time and weathering, the island is a veritable nature-made gem laboratory. Besides the well-known Pangaea, which existed about 300 million years ago, there were several other supercontinents in the Earth’s early history, their assembly and break up cycle helped form most of the world’s gem deposits. A number of these cycles are linked to the formation of gems in Sri Lanka. Most of the country’s gem deposits are in an area known as the Highland Complex, extending northeast to southwest and containing high-grade metamorphic rocks.

Sri Lanka boasts a true mine-to-market industry, both domestically and for export. A fascinating aspect of this is the harmonious and productive blend of tradition, experience and modernization. Mining is done primarily by use of traditional methods, and is small-scale by choice and design as such mines are considered to be less harmful to the environment and a more stable source of employment for more people. Pit, river and mechanized are the three types of mining practiced in Sri Lanka. Manual labor is the primary method used in mining. The National Gem and Jewelry Authority is the regulatory body responsible for the issuance of mining licenses and ensures that all related processes are conducted according to the set standards and rules. The NGJA is particularly strict when it comes to the requirements for mechanized mining. This strategy fortifies the continuous employment of 60,000 to 70,000 gem miners.

Such a fascinating set of historical facts and truly these semi-precious and precious stones are simply stunning.
It is clear that there is a long and rich history of producing and trading precious gems within the eastern world. Looking through historical and fictional writing, it is easy to establish the longstanding connection of Sri Lanka to the gem industry.

If you have any questions or if you would like to know more about the gems available through Jewel Court, do contact Rauf and Ishan on the following email address:

Rauf: abdulrauf598@yahoo.com
Ishan: ihshanrox@gmail.com

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What makes our identities unique?

An interesting subject that seems to be appearing more and more is: ‘what makes each individual unique’ – back in 2016 I wrote a blog called ‘Can we create our own identities from reinvention? which discussed whether we can reinvent our own identities.

Well, exactly what makes us unique?

Psychologists have explored the tricky question of how our sense of uniqueness and identity develops. When a child is born, it has no clear idea of where ‘myself’ ends and ‘the external world’ begins.
It takes a while before the limits are established. And not until the age of two will a child begin to lose its preoccupation with itself, and start to become interested in other people. It is at this time that pronouns begin to appear in its vocabulary ‘my’, ‘me’, ‘you’, ‘I’ and usually in that order. And while the child is two it goes through a stage of rebelliousness and wilfulness in which it suddenly becomes domineering, endlessy, inquisitive, and impatient when its wishes are not gratified straightaway.
The child seems to be waking up to the fact that it has an identity of its own which needs to fit in alongside the identities of other people, and is simply testing out the limits of its powers and freedoms.

However, there are multiple theories about what makes us unique, some related and some not so interconnected. We have been pondering the topic for thousands of years – the ancient Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all theorised about the nature of human existence as have countless philosophers since.
With the discovery of fossils and scientific evidence, scientists have developed theories as well. While there may be no single conclusion, there is no doubt that humans are, indeed, unique. In fact, the very act of contemplating what makes us human is unique among other animal species.

Apart from our obvious intellectual capabilities that distinguish us as a species, humans have several unique physical, social, biological, and emotional traits. While we can’t know precisely what is in the minds of another being, such as an animal, and may, in fact, be limited by our own minds, scientists can make inferences through studies of animal behavior that inform our understanding.

Humans also have unique memories, that Professor Thomas Suddendorf calls “episodic memory.” He says, “Episodic memory is probably closest to what we typically mean when we use the word “remember” rather than “know.” Memory allows human beings to make sense of their existence, and prepare for the future, increasing our chances of survival, not only individually, but also as a species.

Memories are passed on through human communication in the form of storytelling, which is also how knowledge is passed from generation to generation, allowing human culture to evolve. Because human beings are highly social animals, we strive to understand one another and to contribute our knowledge to a joint pool, which promotes more rapid cultural evolution. In this way, unlike other animals, each human generation is more culturally developed than the preceding generations.
Profesor Thomas Suddendorf once said about these stories:

“Even our young offspring are driven to understand others’ minds, and we are compelled to pass on what we have learned to the next generation…. Young children have a ravenous appetite for the stories of their elders, and in play they reenact scenarios and repeat them until they have them down pat. Stories, whether real or fantastical, teach not only specific situations but also the general ways in which narrative works. How parents talk to their children about past and future events influences children’s memory and reasoning about the future: the more parents elaborate, the more their children do.”
Thanks to our unique memory, acquisition of language skills, and ability to write, humans around the world, from the very young to the very old, have been communicating and transmitting their ideas through stories for thousands of years, and storytelling remains integral to being human and to human culture.

Clues about the evolution of our extraordinary minds: Thomas Suddendorf

The big question is: what defines us?

In recent years, many traits once believed to be uniquely human, from morality to culture, have been found in the animal kingdom. So, what exactly makes us special?

Ever since we learned to write, we have documented how special we are. The philosopher Aristotle marked out our differences over 2,000 years ago. We are “rational animals” pursuing knowledge for its own sake. We live by art and reasoning, he wrote.

Much of what he said stills stands. Yes, we see the roots of many behaviours once considered uniquely human in our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos. But we are the only ones who peer into their world and write books about it.

We see the roots of many behaviours once considered uniquely human in our closest relatives
“Obviously we have similarities. We have similarities with everything else in nature; it would be astonishing if we didn’t. But we’ve got to look at the differences,” says Ian Tattersall, a paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Charles Darwin, in his book ‘The Descent of Man’, wrote that humans and animals only differ in degree, not kind. This still stands true but Professor Thomas Suddendorf says that it is precisely these gradual changes that make us extraordinary and has led to “radically different possibilities of thinking”.

And it is these thoughts that allow us to pinpoint to our differences with chimpanzees. That we do so is because they are the closest living relative we have. If any of the now extinct early humans were still alive, we would be comparing our behaviour to them instead.

Still, as far as we know, we are the only creatures trying to understand where we came from. We also peer further back in time, and further into the future, than any other animal. What other species would think to ponder the age of the universe, or how it will end?”

We have an immense capacity for good. At the same time we risk driving our closest relatives to extinction and destroying the only planet we have ever called home.

Finally thoughts, no matter how you look at it, humans are unique, and paradoxical. While we are the most advanced species intellectually, technologically, and emotionally, extending our lifespans, creating artificial intelligence, traveling to outer space, showing great acts of heroism, altruism and compassion, we also continue to engage in primitive, violent, cruel, and self-destructive behavior.

As beings with awesome intelligence and the ability to control and alter our environment, though, we also have a commensurate responsibility to care for our planet, its resources, and all the other sentient beings who inhabit it and depend on us for their survival. We are still evolving as a species and we need to continue to learn from our past, imagine better futures, and create new and better ways of being together for the sake of ourselves, other animals, and our planet.

As Kallam Anji Reddy once said:

‘Everyone has a purpose in life and a unique talent to give to others. And when we blend this unique talent with service to others, we experience the ecstasy and exultation of own spirit, which is the ultimate goal of all goals.’

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Have we forgotten leadership and the foundation of business planning?

One of the questions I hear frequently from emerging and current leaders is this one: “How has leadership changed from 10 years ago and what do I need to understand about running a successful enterprise that I don’t know today?”

Well the reason is simple: only 14 Percent of CEOs Have the Leadership Talent to Execute Their Strategy.

The data in Global Leadership Forecast 2018 shows that organisations with effective leadership talent outperform their peers. Yet very few organizations manage this high-value asset in an integrated, cohesive way.
Even after spending more than $50 billion annually* on developing their leaders, many companies still don’t have the bench strength to meet their future business goals. And despite the spending, investments are often fragmented and see a lack of returns.
Leadership models and development programs abound; few ties to business goals. Worse yet, there’s scant evidence that they actually work. What’s needed is a coherent, integrated leadership strategy.
A well-crafted blueprint ensures that companies have the right talent, at the right cost, and with the right capabilities to deliver today and into the future. Yet, this report found less than one-third of the HR professionals surveyed feel their organisations have an effective leadership strategy. Companies that do have such strategies in place report better returns on their investment in talent. They consistently feature deeper leader bench strength and stronger leaders at all levels.

Many leaders are living under an identity crisis. They are uncertain about how to lead in a more diverse, transient, multigenerational environment that requires them to embrace diversity of thought – and they fail to see the potential opportunities this represents to both workplace and marketplace success.

When leaders become too comfortable with a one-size-fits-all approach to leadership, they conversely become uncomfortable with the uncertainty and change that more successful leaders embrace as part of the job. Complacent leaders are at risk of becoming irrelevant because they are unable or unwilling to course correct their style, approach and attitude to the environment of change they must lead through.

Leaders fail in their primary role and responsibility of enabling the full potential in people and the business they serve because they don’t know the difference between substitution and evolution. Instead of leading the organization and its people to continually evolve, they get stuck in a cycle of complacency and the substitution of activities associated with it. As a result, the company cannot grow or its growth cannot be sustained.

The result is a major shortfall in competent, clued up global leaders.

According to a 2017 report by Price Waterhouse Coopers, 75 percent of hiring managers believe leadership skills are hard to find in new recruits. And a Deloitte study found a whopping 87 percent of companies aren’t effective at building global leaders.

What could be more vital to a company’s long-term health than the choice and cultivation of its future leaders? And yet, while companies maintain meticulous lists of candidates who could at a moment’s notice step into the shoes of a key executive, an alarming number of newly minted leaders fail spectacularly, ill prepared to do the jobs for which they supposedly have been groomed.

Look at Coca-Cola’s M. Douglas Ivester, longtime CFO and Robert Goizueta’s second in command, who became CEO after Goizueta’s death. Ivester was forced to resign in two and a half years, thanks to a serious slide in the company’s share price, some bad public-relations moves, and the poor handling of a product contamination scare in Europe.

Or consider Mattel’s Jill Barad, whose winning track record in marketing catapulted her into the top job—but didn’t give her insight into the financial and strategic aspects of running a large corporation.

Ivester and Barad failed, in part, because although each was accomplished in at least one area of management, neither had mastered more general competencies such as public relations, designing and managing acquisitions, building consensus, and supporting multiple constituencies. They’re not alone. The problem is not just that the shoes of the departed are too big; it’s that succession planning, as traditionally conceived and executed, is too narrow and hidebound to uncover and correct skill gaps that can derail even the most promising young executives.

However, Harvard Business School released some research into the factors that contribute to a leader’s success or failure, the findings found that certain companies do succeed in developing deep and enduring bench strength by approaching succession planning as more than the mechanical process of updating a list. Indeed, they’ve combined two practices: succession planning and leadership development, to create a long-term process for managing the talent roster across their organisations. In most companies, the two practices reside in separate functional silos, but they are natural allies because they share a vital and fundamental goal: getting the right skills in the right place.

A final thought: to succeed in the 21st century workplace and marketplace, leaders must come out from under their identity crisis and embrace diversity of thought so that those they lead can overcome their own identity crises and reach their full potential. They must embrace risk and change as opportunities that others may fail to see as such. And they especially must understand the difference between substitution and evolution: one leads to the trap of complacency, the other leads to a path of growth and continued success. In the end, the wise leader knows their subject matter expertise and specifically what their leadership (identity) solves for – in support of the organisation’s evolution.

Perhaps the underlying lesson is that good succession management is possible only in an organisational culture that encourages candor and risk taking at the executive level. It depends on a willingness to differentiate individual performance and a corporate culture in which the truth is valued more than politeness.

A.P. J. Abdul Kalam once said:

“When we tackle obstacles, we find hidden reserves of courage and resilience we did not know we had. And it is only when we are faced with failure do we realise that these resources were always there within us. We only need to find them and move on with our lives.”