Thought For The Day No. 52 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

...psychologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste..

'There's no 'i' in team, except when it's written in French.'

PMC

Good And Bad Leadership Qualities

..teaching English as a foreign language does very occasionally throw up something interesting; here is a resume of good and bad qualities in any leader, the context being a business English lesson on leadership, naturally enough.

The good points are lifted from here, the bad points came from somewhere we recall not where..

Good ones:

1) Vision - not just having it, which any idiot can do, but doggedly pursuing it, acting and not just visualizing.
2) Integrity - the majority of our leaders probably fall down here.
3) Dedication - remember Roy Castle?! (himself an obnoxious drunk, I seem to remember Victor Lewis-Smith saying).
4) Magnanimity - I couldn't even say it myself initially; essentially giving credit where credit's due and not trying to pass the buck, again something in short supply..
5) Humility - not letting people walk all over you so much as what in modern, inane management-ese would call 'empowering' others.
6) Creativity - yes, thinking outside the box.
7) Openness - even Mikhail Gorbachev was a proponent of this.
8) Fairness - well, yeah.
9) Assertiveness - duh..(don't confuse this with aggressiveness, however)
10) Sense of Humour - in my experience this is the hardest one to cultivate..

Things that good leaders should avoid..(these are no brainers to an even greater extent than the above but worth summarizing, or maybe not..)

1) Too high self-regard.
2) Poor communication skills.
3) Unwillingness to take risks.
4) Indecisiveness.
5) Laissez-Faire attitude.
6) Poor self-discipline.
7) Favouritism.
8) Lying and deceitfulness.
9) Being power-hungry.
10) Seeing the big picture but overlooking the details.
11) Too focused on rules or processes.
12) Authoritarianism.
13) Impulsiveness.
14) Unwillingness to resolve conflicts.
15) Inability to handle criticism.

..Got a boss who exhibits most of the first list and few of the second? Lucky you!

More Cult Info

..Following a previous post, we were interested to find this site, an unofficial (definitely unofficial) precis of Amway. If you're not familiar with this ('Scamway' as I and others like to call it) it's essentially a pyramid scheme, which employs a bait and switch con which tells people they'll be making millions, able to retire in 2-5 years etc. etc., whereas in fact they sign their life away to the cult, get advised to hire a pool of no less than 25 babysitters if they have kids, pour all the hard earned cash into useless training materials etc...In effect it's not about selling, it's about recruiting.

....and it's here in Estonia...

In any event this site is a former Amway distributor, diamond, whatever, who spills the beans and then some. Be sure to check out their responses to Amway's FAQs as well. Being the nasty cult it is, the authors of the site have had to take the precaution of uploading the site at a cyber cafe, hosting the material in Europe even though it's an American site, and other measures, or they would get jumped on with this, that and the other threat, in effect closing them down.

Read for yourself..

Bujinkan Seminar Day Three

...and so it goes, another weekend quiet night in (for us, not sure about the rest of the participants), today everyone was a bit fatigued so went a bit easier, but some useful weapons techniques using knives, bokken, hanbo and bo....take us on at your peril..

Bujinkan Seminar Day Two

..following yesterday's foretaste, today was a full day of Bujinkan, with a good turnout (except from the Tartu school, whence only the head of the school came) and pretty hard work, but useful. On to tomorrow..

Bujinkan Seminar Day One..

...the whole of the PMC have just been to the first installment of the Bujinkan seminar held by Shihan Lauri Jokinen of Finland, a 15th Dan (the highest rating) and we are still alive - found some interesting points of the body which, when an oppo digs his or her fingernails in, cause one to drop to the ground like the proverbial stone (well, like a stone anyway). Unfortunately we can't tell you where they are...you will have to go along to training for that..

...part two update tomorrow..

On This Day 350 Years Ago

..London diarist..

7th April 1661


To White Hall, and there I met with Dr. Fuller of Twickenham, newly come from Ireland; and took him to my Lord's, where he and I dined; and he did give my Lord and me a good account of the condition of Ireland and how it come to pass, through the joyning of the Fanatiques and the Presbyterians, that the latter and the former are in their declaration put together under the names of Fanatiques.

...good to see that some things haven't changed much..

Towards A More Sensible Banking System In Estonia?

The recession of 2008-2010 hit Estonia particularly hard, suffering one of the worst contractions in the EU after several years of extraordinary growth. This can be graphically demonstrated by the fact that, in the peak boom year (2007, just before the crash) banks were prepared to loan out as much through the course of the year as they held in personal deposits (and the total value of loans was about twice that of what was held in deposits).

And people say the banks were reckless?!...hmmm... well they got a lot of properties at knock down prices (since people were unable to keep up with repayments on their mortgages during the recession, the very banks who had given too-easy credit were then getting the houses back and potentially selling them at a profit, thus getting to sell the gold mine and keep the mine, as either Napoleon Hill or W. Clement Stone, I don't remember which, wrote about many years ago). I call it smart myself, don't think they were reckless about their own dealings..

A more recent and relevant truism comes from Robert Kiyosaki - when a bank tells you your home is an asset, they're not lying, they've just omitted to tell you whose asset it is (i.e. the bank's). But I regress...

Today it's very different as the banks reined in their own willingess to grant out loans to something more like a level it should have been in the first place, and loan turnover to February 2011 was only 15% of what they held in deposits.

This was further exacerbated by peoples' willingness to save during the recession years, and total savings (both personal and commercial) in Estonia are today at, I believe, a record level (about 10.5 Billion Euros - in a country of just 1.3 Million people!).

This is slightly puzzling given that inflation towards the end of 2010 and beginning of 2011 was very high (I've been quoted figures as high as 20% though am sceptical - though certainly the lower estimates of 4% seem a bit optimistic too) thus eroding those savings. But there's a natural tendency to hoard here in crisis times, which has served the country well in the past.

Just in case you're wondering where I'm getting these figures from (some of them anyway) or if you're wondering what the hell I'm talking about, and if you can read Estonian, you can see a fuller explanation here..

Brain Puzzler For Today..

Imagine a bacteria which, when having access to a source of food, will double in number every minute. So starting with one, we have two, one minute later, then four a minute after that etc. etc. for as long as there is food available.

Now imagine that scientist bloke off the Muppets puts just a single cell of this bateria (or a single bacterium) into a bottle, with plenty of food, and leave the room. It is 8.00am. When they (he comes back with that annoying Beaker thing) return at 12.00pm, ie. four hours later, they arrive just in time to see the very last scrap of food being devoured, and the bottle being completely saturated, ie. full of bacteria.

Now the question - at what point in time did the bottle become a quarter full?...


....think about it....




.....this can actually be done to the nearest minute...




....if you can't get the solution or can't be arsed, scroll down a bit..




...the time the bottle became a quarter full was 11.58 a.m., ie. only two minutes before the scientists returned!

Well done if you got it, if not, you probably stumbled on the fact that you tried to calculate the answer going from the beginning, with 1, 2, 4, 8, 16...bacteria....and of course it's impossible to say how many bacteria constitute a quarter-full bottle anyway.

The key is to start from the end. If the bottle becomes full at 12.00pm, that means one minute before, at 11.59, it's half full (since the number doubles every minute), and thus a minute before that, it's a quarter full. Therefore, a mere seven minutes before the finish, or 11.53am, the bottle is only 1/128th, or less than one per cent, full.

This has a wider application in fact, and I originally heard about it in the context of pyramid selling, where newcomers were being duped into parting with a lot of money in order to 'get started' in a market that seemed to have had very limited penetration, thus providing very fertile ground for making a lot of sales in comparison with other, more saturated markets. In reality, the market was at 11.53 a.m. or thereabouts, as if by magic it suddenly became quarter, then a half, then completely full, and the hapless would-be salesperson was left scuppered.

On the other hand the mould in the cup I left in the cupboard under the sink seems to be multiplying at an even more rapid rate..